Meal Time

We've tasked Eryn with cooking one meal a week. With help. But she has to pick what we're going to eat and do a better than equal share of the preparation. This week was foil dinners, courtesy of the cookbook my Aunt and cousins bought me and my brother when we were kids, Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls. Which, just as an aside, has a price as low as $0.01 on Amazon used books and retailed for $3.95 around Christmas of 1980.

Eryn seemed o.k. with the idea of cooking dinner. She's been involved in chocolate chip cookie production before and has helped me by fetching things from the fridge as necessary. And things went pretty well at first. Here you can see her chopping up carrots and potatoes, which was a little difficult as we used only a semi-sharp knife and were overly cautious about how hard she could press to chop the vegetables.


The big trouble came when we used a mixture of pork and hamburger to give the meals a meatloaf flavor. That required mixing the meat, and I had her do it by hand instead of a with a spoon. As you can see, her interest in squishing ground cow and pig between her fingers is dubious at best. In the full set of pictures, you can see her going from unsure, to mild dislike, to this one, a bit grossed out. I promised her next time we'd use a spoon to mix it, but that most people who eat hamburger tend to use their hands so they can form appropriate patty-shaped lumps. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to eat the poor beastie(s), you should have a firm understanding of what happened to the critter, and Eryn has always sort of understood where chicken and hamburger comes from, but this did seem to drive it home a little more. Then again, she's had that same face reserved for pumpkin guts since we first carved a pumpkin.