New Cooking Experiences

If you read this blog, you probably know me well enough to know that I love to cook. It is one of my favorite creative outlets (the artistic expressions of painting and drawing got left somewhere in my early twenties - one day I hope to re-visit them).

Andrew is old enough now that he recognizes the joy in cooking, making things from scratch and the desire to share special time together in the kitchen. This week, we made two new things, both very easy, that we wanted to share with you. I'm a slacker and don't have cutesy photos of us doing this together, but you will have to trust me when I say Drew helped in every way and was very good at it.


This is photo is so out of focus, but it is of a Mini Beef Wellington we made, on the fly. I was digging through the pantry, the freezer and the refrigerator, and decided with some leftover chopped mushrooms, half an onion, some butter, a top round roast, a can of pizza dough and some 'saucy' ingredients, we could manage to pull off individual Wellingtons for dinner.

We pre-cooked the roast in the crockpot, in a sauce of beef broth, mixed with some Worcestershire sauce and a little Dijon mustard. I can't give you measurements, because I just eye-balled it. Once the beef was cooked, its juice mixed with these three ingredients created a lovely sauce.

While the beef was in the crockpot, we chopped the onion and mushrooms in the mini-chopper to a rough paste mixture. Then we cooked over some butter in a non-stick pan.

Then we cut the pizza dough into six pieces, flattened each piece, put a spoonful of the mushroom mixture in the middle, and wrapped like a little present. This was Drew's favorite part! We then baked in the oven for about 15 minutes to warm and cook the dough. We served with our homemade sauce that was heated and whisked over low heat.




These are called Kart Wheels. We got this recipe out of the Alpha-Bakery for Kids cookbook put out by Gold Medal Flour. My godmother gave me this book a long time ago to save for when I had children.

We mixed the dough mixture, then shaped them into little bowls and we filled with raspberry jam. Drew loved getting to make these, as prior to our getting started, he was asking to play with Play-Doh. This was way better, and we could actually eat these!