Cooking with a Cub Scout

Ryan is 8 years old and currently a Wolf in the Cub Scouts.   He's been working really hard to get his goals passed off and tonight we passed off a big one!  Ryan had to plan and prepare a meal.  In addition to that he had to set the table, clear it after dinner and help with the dishes.  I let him decide which meal he wanted to cook and he chose spaghetti and meatballs.  While there were a couple of mishaps and we had to go over why it's very important to pay attention to what you are doing while cooking...he really didn't do too bad of a job!  So here's a little photo story of Ryan's adventure. :-)

First you have to make the meatballs...it's very serious business.  We used two pounds of ground beef and added our usual spices...salt, pepper, garlic, oregano and a bit of season salt.  We put them on a cookie sheet and set them to broil.

While Ryan was making meatballs, I chopped the garden fresh tomatoes and green bell pepper.  Ryan added the tomatoes and peppers to the sauce pan.

Then I had Ryan open the tomato paste and add some water and carefully stir it up.  Then he added a packet of McCormick's Thick and Zesty spaghetti seasoning, mixing that in carefully also.  You'll notice that I said "carefully" twice...we had to remember that after we had a small tomato paste incident, which is evident by the sauce on the stop top and Ryan's shirt. :-)

We set our sauce to simmer (and Ryan learned what simmer meant) and then we turned our meatballs that were broiling.

Prior to doing anything else, we set a pot of water to boil.  Ryan wanted to close his eyes so when he was breaking the spaghetti in half a piece wouldn't hit him in the eye.  (Hey!  It could totally happen!:-))

Now that we have sauce simmering, meatballs broiling and noodles cooking it's time to make some juice!

Oh that poor stove! :-)  The meatballs are done broiling and now we add them into the sauce!

I didn't get pictures of Ryan buttering bread or opening the mandarin oranges or setting the table...yeah I know I'm terrible.  But I did get some pictures of them enjoying dinner!

Ryan enjoying his creation!  He would have been completely happy if I would have let him just eat the meatballs!

Cole wanted a picture too! :-)

After dinner we cleaned up and then Ryan read to Cole for a while.  It was a nice evening with yummy food.  I was super proud of Ryan for how great he did and how well he listened.  Way to go Ryan!