Day 70 - Breakfast Eggy Crumpets

Recipe From Jamie Oliver Online

HELLO EVERYBODY!!!!!! Howhaveyoubeen?Ihavebeengood,thanksforasking.

It's day 70!

Quotes from us:

"I think that we've cooked every day for 70 days is a bit misleading because there have actually been about 2 exempt days when neither Sophie or I cooked. One was when my mom did a guest post and the day Caleb cooked for us. So really it's not day 70, but it is, so it's contradicting, but if you have an open-minded mind as a Jedi, then you will understand the ways of the Force...and the ways of counting." ~Jared

"First off, you should know that Jared is just a little...he must know everything. He must say everything that he thinks. But about day 70. I think it's amazing we've accomplished cooking for 70 days. Most kids think cooking is hard and they think only moms can do it. They're very wrong. If you've ever watched Iron Chef, I think you know how many guy cookers there are. And I bet President Obama has cooked at least a hamburger. I think 70 days of cooking is cool. I don't think many kids could cook for 70 days straight. Or, as Jared says, 67 days. I'm proud and think I've done something good in the world. Now, back to you, Jared..." ~Sophie

My prediction yesterday was true. It's been a very good weekend so far. As you can tell I'm having a good day, and if ya can't then... well you need to check your mind.

Just kidding!!!!

Well this was a really good recipe and I loved it. Better than french toast and that's saying something. Well, to make this dish, you just need to soak crumpets in eggs that were beaten together. Then cook some bacon and put the crumpets in the fat and cook it until golden brown.

We didn't actually have crumpets...no surprise there... so we used english muffins. But they're both from England, so no one really cares...except for the people that really do care. If you do care, then I would like to apologize. The english muffins did work spiffingly, which is, indeed, a word.

This is not one of your typical Jamie Oliver healthy meals. Cooking in bacon fat is fatty. So not good...but good. I will definitely make this again, but will do it without the bacon fat and see how that works.

They're Greeeeaaat.

Eleventy-Four THUMBS UP!!! Which is the equivalent of 114.

Day 69 - Burgers & Sliders

Recipe from Jamie Oliver Online

This is going to be a perfect weekend, and since I'm a Jedi, I can tell. I can tell because I had a good day at school today, despite my tooth, because it doesn't really hurt anymore, minus the pressure because there's a little bit of pain when I eat. But it's still better. I have no homework. It is fall, officially. And it was all dark and gloomy today, which I like. It was rainy, which is good.

I'm not like a gloom-demon, I just like the rain and cool weather.

Even though I would not have chosen this particular dish to celebrate the weather, I thought it was good. I like hamburgers, but they're not my first choice.

My first choice is one of the following:

1. pizza
2. Asian food
3. Mexican.

Generally I like a lot of things in those categories. I'm not a huge fan of American food. So I would have chosen one of those genres of food, but before I could say that, my mom had already taken hamburger meat out.

My mom didn't didn't want to defrost a gluten free hamburger bun because we already had a GF hotdog bun out...

...so I cut it in half and made sliders for me using a little tool the Texas Beef Council mailed my mom as part of that luncheon she went to last week (she guest blogged here, remember?).

I thought using that tool was kind of an interesting tool because it makes, like, a perfect circle out of the meat.

What makes these burgers different from a regular hamburger is:

1. They're not processed, per our food philosophy (which is healthy and, like, make your own stuff)
2. You put sautéed red onions in it
3. You put an egg in it (which we bypassed because we didn't have any eggs--shocking!--or egg whites, and even though I went to the neighbors to borrow one, no one was home because they were at the high school football game which we were not at because it's an away game)
4. Cracker crumbs, but we used GF corn flake crumbs
5. Shredded parmesan cheese

I think these were good, but they weren't muy perfecto because:

1. They were too thick
2. I'm just not a huge fan of hamburgers

I give them 1 3/4 THUMBS UP. My dad would have liked more zing, but he still ate 2 of them, plus Caleb's 1/8 leftover.

Day 68 - Commercial Break: The Best Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread

Recipe from Special Guest Chef Christy Stutzman

What a day!

I mean how many days a year do you have to get an emergency root canal surgery?!

I had gross puss stuff coming out of my mouth. I don't think that I will be going to school tomorrow. After the experience of the endodonist drilling in the back of my tooth, I thought that I, Jared, deserve a break and a treat.

The Good Dr. Patel

Oh. That endodonist did get rid of my tooth thing in case you were worried (which I doubt you were) about me.

I was feeling a bit weird after all this. I wanted to make something a little sugary. I can only eat soft things, so I had the perfect thought. Especially since it's officially fall now.

After the swelling decreased a little bit and I felt better, I made my favorite thing in the whole world (dramatic pause)...chocolate chip pumpkin bread.

We have the best recipe in the world for chocolate chip pumpkin bread. It's from our friends in California, last name Stutzman.

Just mix it all together.

Mrs. Stutzman would make it for me and my friend (her son) who is also Jared, so this is kind of to honor her and her brilliance because she made it gluten free for me when I was first diagnosed with celiac disease.

This is our favorite GF flour (but we still have to try King Arthur)

Look, one handed!

All we do is substitute the flour with gluten free flour, and it has mammoth flavor.

It's not a Jamie Oliver recipe, and it's not really a healthy recipe, but everyone deserves a treat every now and then, right? So today is our commercial break from our challenge. I still cooked, root canal and all, so I say the challenge is still good.

What do you think? And I'm good?

This is 2 THUMBS UP + A GAZILLION

Notice the swelling?

Day 67 - Chicken Pasta Bake

Recipe from Jamie Oliver Online

My brother named Jared has a tooth ache pain from being hit in mouth by our brother Caleb's head. He says he's about to die. So I cooked have cooked the past 3 nights.

I was not in the mood to cook because I had to do my homework, I had just run for running club, I had to work on a power point about Oprah Winfrey and decisions she's made for school, and my brother Sam's piano students were here. So my mom was looking up recipes while I was doing some gymnastics. I was trying to do the splits and handstands, and I was putting my leg behind my head, which I can do. She found this recipe called a Chicken Pasta Bake.

I thought, hmmm, are we going to have regular chicken or red chicken? Red chicken is what we call chicken we get from a Mexican market. It's got paprika and garlic on it. So my mom answered that it would be the red chicken. I said I didn't know how that would work, but she said it would be okay.

I have to convert the measurements.

So now, this is how we made it. You need garlic. Caleb used our new garlic thingamabobber. He liked that. He did that part for me.

I did the rest. He can't really chop at all.

This was easy to make. The pasta you just boil regularly. We used quinoa.

You cook the chicken in a pan until it's brown. Then you add the garlic. Then add 2 cups of white wine and cook that for a while.

Then you add cream, only we used 1/2 cream and 1/2 nonfat milk. You also add chopped basil and shredded parmesan cheese.

I used fresh basil from our front yard.

This all gets mixed with the cooked pasta. You put it in a pan and sprinkle with some parmesan and then put in the oven until the top is brown.

I had never thought of baking pasta like this. I thought it was good. My little brother Caleb, on the other hand, did not like it. He says, "It's below 0 thumbs up for me, Caleb, mwahahaha."

AJ liked it and went back for seconds. Mama liked it. I liked it. And Sam's piano student and her mom liked it.

They said 2 Thumbs Up

Mom says we'll do this again. The only thing we didn't have was mushrooms. Mom says it would be good to add some asparagus, too.

2 THUMBS UP!

Day 67- Stuffed Spaghetti Squash

Recipe from Jamie Oliver's Online Forum

Today you probably already know that i made spaghetti squash !!!!!!! i love this stuff !

Well a lot of people probably like it to, so you might like it to, but that is up to you.

This is how you make it. You need three garlic cloves, spaghetti squash, olive oil

thyme, ham, and pepper.

This was maybe the 3rd or 4th time we've had spaghetti squash. The recipe says to cook the squash in the oven, but we didn't have time to do it that way. The way my mom learned is to clean out he seeds, drizzle olive oil or butter (we used olive oil), cover with plastic wrap, and cook in the microwave for 10 minutes. In the recipe, you are supposed to use the oven and it take 35 minutes.

First I had to clean out the seeds. It was hard.

After it's cooked, I scraped all the actual squash part out of the shell. This is really hard to do when it's hot because you can't pick it up. I pressed too hard at one part and the shell broke and that's not something you want to happen at all.

When the squash is scraped out, it looks like spaghetti. It's yellow and in strips. Spaghetti is a grain, so it's almost the same, except the texture is different, but that's basically all.

My brother Sam described it as sort of crunchy and you can taste the grains, sort of. He is not a a fan of spaghetti squash.

You mix the squash with the shredded parmesan, garlic, cooked ham, pepper, and thyme.

Then put it back into the shells, and bake it for about 15 minutes. This makes the cheese melt and it all gets gooey and delicious. It would also be good if you didn't bake it again. I just think it wouldn't be so melty.

Oh! Today I used this garlic dealy-mbob from Pampered Chef. You take it and put the garlic cloves in it, you roll it around, and it takes the garlic wrapper off. It was super easy and cool.

I give this 1 1/2 THUMBS UP because it was kind of a lot of flavors colliding for moi. Maybe there was too much parmesan. Not sure. But my papa, on the other hand, said, "I love this! It's so yummy!" He liked it best of all the times we've made spaghetti squash.

Day 66 - Baked Apples

Recipe from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

Hello! Wassup?

Today Jared and I made baked apples. I've never had baked apples in my life and so was my chance. We wanted to do something different. When it got out of the oven, it looked like apple sauce on an apple.

There's lemon and orange zest in the apples, too.  When you're zesting, you don't actually go to the orange or lemon fruit.  You grate the skin that you don't eat.  It's kind of weird that the skin has so much flavor, but it does.

The skill I learned today is to not core an apple with a glass bowl next to you. If your brother gives you a corer with part of the apple still in it and tells you to get it out, never get it out with a knife. Because if you accidentally slip, you can tip over the glass bowl and it will fall on the floor right where your cat is laying. Plus you could cut yourself, but I was using a butter knife, not a sharp knife, and the bowl broke but the cat was like, zzzzppppp, out of the kitchen.

One Jared noticed is that we never have all of the ingredients for any recipe. Jamie Oliver must have a ginormous pantry and cabinets to have every ingredient. We did not have all the ingredients today. We didn't have cloves or almonds or mixed spices. So we used ground cloves, pecans, oats, and we figured the mixed spices were cinnamon, ginger, and maybe nutmeg.

You stuff the cored apple with the filling.

Jared did his the way he wanted and I did mine the way I wanted, so we each got our own apples. I put butter, raisins, brown sugar, pecans, the spices, and a little oats in mine. Jared didn't put the raisins or pecans in his.

They bake, which is something that surprised me.

What I discovered is that baked apples are yummy. They taste like apple sauce on an apple with little toppings on it. Jared thinks it's a little sweet or tart or something. I think it's good, but I didn't like the skin.

Baked apples are something I will definitely do again.

2 THUMBS UP

Day 65 - Cucumber Yogurt

Recipe from Jamie's Food Revolution

Hello! I was at a birthday party yesterday and so I didn't get to make anything. My little brother, Caleb did, so that was good for him. Thanks, Cabe!!

I missed cooking for the last two days. I think cooking is a way to let your feelings out. If you like to cook, it's something you want to do everyday. I think my brother feels that way, also. I think my Grammy and Mama think so, too, sometimes.

What it does for me is that I get involved with the cooking and I don't think about what happened about earlier at school, say, or if a girl pinches me. FYI, someone did and I was super angry at that one person. I was crying. I was upset. I wanted to go back and tell her, "You know what? You are a mean, rude girl."

Instead of yelling at that girl, I made Cucumber Yogurt sauce, which is also called Tzaziki. It's one of my favorite sauces and I was super happy to see that Jamie Oliver has a recipe for it in his Food Revolution cookbook.

The things you need in it are cucumber, plain yogurt, lemon juice, and we added garlic. Now, my grandpa emailed me and suggested I tell more about skills I'm using. I think that's a good idea because if kids are reading this (we actually got an email from a kid!), they could learn some of what I've learned. And Jared, too.

First I cut the cucumber in half

Today I used my chopping skills, but I did a thing called mincing. Mincing is very, very finely chopping.

I got to use the sharp knives today. When I was chopping the cucumber, I curled my fingers so that way I didn't chop off my finger.

That would not be a wonderful thing.

Oh! I also learned that garlic can be very, very strong. It made the sauce a little bit spicy, but I like it that way. I used a garlic press which is very cool.

Cucumber yogurt is so yummy in my tummy. We had it with grilled chicken and brown rice and green beans. It was a super healthy, yummy meal!

A Bazillion, or 2, THUMBS UP