Food and Nutrition 4-H style

We just participated in our county's 4-H Food and Nutrition contest. Again. This was Daisy's 4th year and Juniors 3rd and I honestly just wasn't into it this year.

It just felt rushed and we weren't able to participate as well as we would have liked. Plus some things I just didn't feel like messing with or forgot to put down. Anyway, although Daisy did well (from comments made by the judges and overheard by a friend) she didn't do well enough to win. I didn't really think she would when I saw who she was competing against.

Junior on the other hand TOTALLY would have won if his age group got any sort of prize that was based on performance. Seriously, at that age a kid could say "I don't know anything about it, my mother made it, I don't even like to eat it" and still win a ribbon.

Junior LOVED his dish though - since it was hummus I think a lot of the people were leery of it - this is East Texas. But Junior loves it. When he was asked what his favorite part of making it was his response was an enthusiastic "Eating it!"

One thing that struck us funny though, we get the judges score cards (with the actual numbers cut off) and one of the comments on Daisy's was "Good Job on reducing your sugar intake." It took me awhile but I finally figured out that they thought we are reducing glucose and not gluten.

She is already planning on doing some kind of bread next year and educating the judges.

Comments

White and Dark Chocolate Dacquoise

This is what my 11 year old daughter made for youth fair. So you could do this. What is a daquoise? it is a meringue cake (usually the meringue has nuts but this one doesn't) that usually frosted somewhat like a normal cake. This one has a white chocolate and dark chocolate buttercream that goes between the layers of meringue and then is topped by a ganache. uh-huh. The buttercream is not the typical birthday cake buttercream that is just butter and powdered sugar, in fact the dark chocolate has a bit of the bitter taste of dark chocolate (enough so that my kids didn't like it without the meringue). Anyway, it is wonderful! but it is also incredibly time consuming. This is something to make for a big anniversary dinner, not a I-feel-like-having-chocolate Thursday. The first step is to make a meringue. And here is the cast of characters that play in the meringue: And yes, buy the 18 pack because you will only have 2 eggs left - and a freezer full of yolks. Unless you

Sourdough Herb Boule

Sometimes when developing recipes, it has to be tried several times and tweaked. Other times it just all falls into place but you never quite know which way it will go. A few weeks ago, Living Without sent a newsletter with a recipe for a sourdough bread and we had been wanting a sourdough. Yum. So I called Daisy in to help me mix up the starter, mainly so she could see that it wasn't a big deal. It isn't a long complicated thing, it just takes a few days. Four days later we had a loaf of sourdough bread with supper and Daisy took one bite and said "contest bread!" We had been experimenting with some yeast bread and had pretty much picked one out but once she tried the sourdough, she loved it. I had seen a beautiful round loaf on Pinterest that had herbs baked onto the bread crust as decoration. Daisy and I thought it looked beautiful and since the judges won't actually taste the food (worries of food poisoning), it needs to look as good as possible.

Score two for me!

As I have said, my kids are less than delighted with our new diet. In fact they have complained about it a fair bit but today I redeemed myself in their eyes. I made pancakes and chocolate cookies. I actually made 2 batches of pancakes, one a Bob's Red Mill and the other a variation on Alton Brown's Dutch Oven Hoecakes . I made the Bob's Red Mill according to the directions using vanilla soy milk but then needed to add a bit more milk because it was too thick. The hoecakes I added 1 tablespoon of sugar and didn't put in the corn (someone thinks he doesn't like corn.) Daisy loved the hoecakes although she did say that if they were very big, they were too cornbready. I agree with her, the cornbread flavor is more noticeable on the larger one. It seems the good size is silver dollar pancake size. She also liked the Bob's Red Mill pancakes, she said she would be happy with either one. Junior prefered the mix but his hoecake was pretty big so that may be the

Kitchen Chaos

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