Cooking: Dirt Cups

This week, our summer cooking extravaganza continued by making dirt cups!  This is definitely one of my favorite desserts, so I figured I should introduce it to my students as well.  Although all of them loved making it, only about half of them enjoyed eating it.  I guess a lot of my kids are picky about having different ingredients mixed together in one dish...or maybe it's because we called it "dirt" (?)  However, one awesome part was that my student with a severe feeding disorder (who currently doesn't eat any real food), loved licking the spoon of the pudding/coolwhip combo!  Super awesome!

As you have seen in my previous cooking posts, we use visual directions like these.  These are great to work on reading and following directions.  We often read a step, then ask the kids what we need to do next.  They have to re-exlpain it using their own words.  Or we have them find the materials they need to complete the step.  

To make the oreos into crumbs, we put them in a plastic bag and had the kids use a rolling pin to break them.  I wanted each kid to do their own, so I gave 3 oreos to each kid.  This seemed to work perfectly.

This was a pretty involved activity and I did it with more kids than normal, so taking pictures was a little bit harder to do!  However, here is the finished product!

And, of course, I made my kiddos fill out their comprehension sheets.  From practicing these every week, my kids have gotten so much better at completing them independently.  These are also nice because you can send them home to parents so they know what their kid did in school that day!  

 

You can get the recipe and comprehension sheet for the dirt cups as a part of a set of recipes found here.

Ok...if you only care about school stuff, you can stop here.  I know this isn't a food blog, and I am not much of a chef....just pretty good at following recipes.  But, in all my spare summer time off, I have been trying to cook a bunch of my stored up Pinterest recipes and I wanted to share with someone (besides my husband) how they have turned out.  So if you are ok with that...read on!

I made this avocado egg salad from Never Homemaker.  Super tasty and easy to make!  I added tomatoes because no sandwich is complete for me without them!  I also used greek yogurt instead of mayo...yum yum!  I was full for hours after eating this!

I also made this one pot pasta dish from Apron Strings Blog.  Everything literally goes in one pot, then you just bring it a boil for 10 minutes and it is good to go!  Super easy and very flavorful!  She has other versions too...I'm trying the Asian version next week!

Here is the before picture:

Here is the after picture:

I HAD TO make these cookie, oreo, brownie bars that are all over Pinterest.  They were super tasty and easy.  I just used store bought cookie dough on the bottom, followed by a layer of Oreos, and topped with brownie mix (from a box).  I loved them....a little too much.  So I had to start giving them away to anyone who would take them. 

Oh, and my friend and I had a fun cauliflower night.  We made cauliflower pizzas (her own recipe) and I made this BBQ cauliflower salad I found on pinterest from Fork and Beans.  I am in love...I ate the leftovers all week and was super bummed when they were all gone!

Ok, you can say it....I'm a food freak.  However, these were made over the course of the last 3 weeks.  Thanks for indulging me and letting me share!