Play Cooking

 Like medicine cabinets, spice cabinets need to be cleaned out ever so often. And by ever so often I mean every year or so, not every decade or so. Yes, medicine goes bad, but unlike medicine, which has expiration dates printed on it, most spice jars don't have expiration dates printed on them, but they do expire. Unfortunately a lot the spices that you can get in your local grocery store are past their prime when you buy them. You get what you pay for, what can I say. When you open a bottle of spices you shouldn't have to put your nose in it to smell its wonderful flavor. It should be more like in chemistry class when you would waft the smell to your nose and smell their wonderful flavor. 

Audra, why are you talking about the freshness of spices in a blog entitled play cooking, you might ask. Here's why, when you clean out your spice cabinet, getting rid of the spices that have lost their smell and need to be replaced, the old spices can be put to great use during play cooking time. This takes play cooking to a whole different level because your mud pie actually spells like food, in turn getting another sense involved in the playing process. I have used up most of my old spices, but might buy some at the dollar store for future play cooking activities. Any spice you pay a dollar for isn't going to be fresh, I'm just saying. But it would be perfect for a mud pie. 

Yesterday, while finally enjoying some spring time weather, I brought out all the makings for an epic play cooking session outside. Zane love to help cook in Mamma's kitchen, so having full rain over his own 'kitchen' is always a blast. Since we were outside I could give him real ingredients to play with. What I usually do is go through my cabinet getting the odds and ends that haven't been used, or the boxes of things that don't really have enough left to do anything with, and the old spices that need to be replaced with new ones. Yesterday's spice was Creole seasoning so it was a pretty spicey sand pie. The other ingredients included, beans, rice, and randomly bean noodles which I have no idea how they got in my cabinet, but have been there for a year, so they were fair game for play cooking time. 

First you add the beans and rice, then you add some water,

 then the sand,

 then spice up the sand mixture with a little creole seasoning, 

 stir,

say cheese for the camera,

then you have these three beautiful dishes for your outdoor meal. If you look closely you will see two little carrots, left over from last years garden, and some fresh herbs from our garden as well. The fresh herbs also added a great smell and would work great for play cooking as well. If it ever would warm up here, so my herbs would actually grow, we would use more of them in our cooking.

 Once your dishes are done it's time to plate.

 It's all in the presentation people.

 Three plates, one for Rowan of course, who was having a great time as well. 

 And then we dined. Zane was pretty depressed that we used paper plates, because he really wanted to do the dishes. Sadly, he just got to throw them away. He loved cooking time and would have stayed out there until it got dark, but Rowan was getting a bit chilly so we had to head inside. I'm sure there will be many more outdoor cooking session in our future. He would really like to pretend to grill, but I haven't figure out how to make that happen yet. Maybe I can make a pretend grill from a box some how, hmmm.... to be continued.