Cooking Games and Dips

Collectively we have a love affair with dips. What better way to spend an afternoon that sitting on the couch watching your favorite show than when sharing bean dip, or spinach dip, or onion dip with your best friend? The dips allow us a wide choice of flavors and new food items without being overbearing, but making all of those dips can also be great cooking games!

Cooking games are a great way to experiment with different food items, and dips are a lot like soups. You can throw all sorts of things together to make one meal and the more you figure out about how to make a particular kind of dip, the better prepared you’re going to be for the evening at home on the couch. The cooking games for making dips can be very easy. In fact, many of them don’t even require using the oven. The microwave is enough for many of them, and others just require mixing some packets of ingredients together. What could be easier than that for cooking games?

Cooking Games and Appliances

It’s a shame, but cooking games can be ruined by bad appliances. There’s a reason that so many people spend huge amounts of money to update their kitchens. They want the top of the line appliances, and this makes sense if you’re struggling to come up with the right conditions to cook your favorite meals and play some serious cooking games.

For example, last night I was playing some cooking games of my own. I went to make brownies. I started the cooking games as you always should by following instructions about preheating the oven. Unfortunately, my oven is about thirty years old and doesn’t heat very well, or at least not evenly. So the cooking games I was playing didn’t really work out. The brownies I was trying to make for a friend almost burned around the sides, but the center was still absolutely dough. You could actually reach in and scoop it out the same way you could in the bowl I mixed it. It was a very frustrating, although delicious in a gooey way, cooking game.

Cooking Games and Easter

There are only a few traditional items that pop up around Easter, and most of them are chocolate or coated in sugar. When you’re working with cooking games, you’ll want to find something new and exciting to create. There’s no sense in making something that’s been done countless times before if it’s not something you really want to make. Why not get creative with your Easter cooking games?

Start with the favorite candies of the holidays – jelly beans, bunnies and chocolate. Then why not build a house, much like a ginger bread house, but out of those items? Icing can seal everything together for the finished project. Or if you’d rather do something simpler, play with the jelly beans – spell out messages, make skewers with patterns or package up some for your best friend. The Easter cooking games are an opportunity to really create something special.

Cooking Games and Knife Safety

If you’re going to play cooking games in your kitchen, one of the most important things you can do is learn how to handle a knife correctly. When possible, you should always handle a knife in the company of someone else who can help you remember to use the knife safely. Having someone else there is also great insurance against a mistake simply because that friend or family member might be the one to drive you to the emergency room if you do goof somehow.

When you’re using a knife you should follow a few simple rules:
Always use a sharp knife. A sharp knife will cut more cleanly and more quickly. A dull knife, however, will be harder to use and it is more likely to slip when you’re trying to cut and cut you instead.

Always cut away from yourself. Don’t leave your fingers in the way of the knife and push the knife away from you rather than pulling it toward you where it can slip and jump into your hand, arm or chest.

Point knives down in the dishwasher. If you’re washing knives by hand, don’t drop them into soapy water where you can’t feel what you’re grabbing. If you’re loading the knives into the dishwasher, put them into the racks with the blades facing downward for safe handling for the next cooking games.

Healthy Cooking Games

There are so many fun cooking games out there to play, but a huge number of them all seem to have health issues. The cooking games we enjoy most are the ones that include things like making cookies, adding sprinkles and frosting and baking cakes. It’s time for us to find more cooking games that can be considered healthy!
Fruit Salad – Fruit salads are one of the easiest cooking games for those looking to find a healthy alternative to the non-healthy cooking games. Cut up all sorts of pieces of fruit and combine them together. Make a berry salad or use skewers for the fruit to make it more exciting.

Muffins and Bread – If you make your muffins and bread from scratch, you can limit the amount of sugar you use by making healthy substitutions. Using applesauce instead of sugar, for example, or bananas and nuts to flavor a rich bread is absolutely delicious and healthy.

Cooking Games and Avoiding Sugar

There are too many sugary delicious items out there for me and my cooking games. I loved making cookies, brownies and cakes with my kids and I still do at times, but it’s starting to bother me how little there is that’s fun to make that is sugar free. Not only is sugar bad for all of us, but it’s been affecting my health and my energy levels lately. I’m bound and determined to find cooking games that require less sugar and healthier overall.

The one area where I’ve decided to start my new cooking games are the breads. Making bread is actually pretty fun, especially if you start mixing in different ingredients. Granted, there is still sugar in bread, but there is considerably less in the dark breads than the white breads, so I’ll be starting there. I’m going to play cooking games with my kids and we’ll all have fun with steaming, hot bread for snacks this winter.

Cooking Games and Cookies

Cookies are one of the first things kids learn to make that involves more than pushing a button on the microwave. If you’re working with your children to playing cooking games for cookies, always remember that the safety should be your first less. Your kids will likely be using scissors and almost certainly the oven as they cook.

Start with the place and bake style cookies. Simply grease a tray and then cut open a pack of dough. Your children can place the cookies on the tray on their own and once they have them arranged, it’s a simple matter to fire up the oven and bake them. The hardest part is teaching your children how to use the oven correctly – a full hand oven mitt will help protect their arms and hands from burns, but supervision for the first few cookie making experiences will certainly serve you well, too.