Authors 50 and 51: Two for One! Rosenbaum and Jacques

October Ale was the recipe Sarah made from The Redwall Cookbook by Brian Jacques. It's just two ingredients: 2 cups ginger ale and 1 cup grape juice. Mix and serve chilled. It was a cool refresher for July. She's mixed up several batches already.


We tried the Cheese Pizza from Williams-Sonoma Fun Food cookbook by Stephanie Rosenbaum.
It doesn't look pretty but it tasted good. We added pineapple and Canadian bacon and pepperoni and even some marinated artichoke hearts. Eva picked the recipe and helped mix and roll the dough.


Picking out cookbooks from the library has been a good exercise for helping the girls get more interested in making food and trying new things. Even though we have not enjoyed all the recipes, we've learned along the way and I think that cooking is an art that requires practice. If you don't repeat cooking, doing some of the same things and doing new things, then you're not going to learn what works for you without practice. I've reminded my children that I probably have at least 10,000 to 20,000 hours of practice for cooking and baking and related arts and I still make plenty of mistakes but I also know what works in some situations. I want them to learn what works for them. This includes goals that they won't just heat up a frozen dinner or go out every night, but rather that they will have at least a few recipes that they know they like and that they can make on their own by the time they reach college if not before then.