Forks over Knives challenge

So, the other day, when my parents were visiting over Thanksgiving, we watched a true-to-life movie about a lady who challenged herself to cook from Julia Childs’ cookbook over the period of one year, writing a blog about it. I mentioned to my mother, “hey, I could do that, except maybe I could do one on the Forks over Knives cookbook, instead.” She, of course, thought that was a great idea.

We have been also working on the Pathfinder cooking honor, not as a requirement for the club, but as part of schoolwork. One of the requirements in the honor is to put together a file of 10 recipes they have made. So we are making some of the recipes in the Forks Over Knives cookbook.

Combining these two projects into one came to mind, so I made a list of some of the recipes to start with and we will be making them over the course of the next few months and letting you know how they fare in our family’s tastes.

Thus far, we have made 3 recipes from the 2012 edition of the cookbook.

A couple of weeks ago, Joshua made Mac and Cheese which is on page 2 which used the No-Cheese sauce from page 29. It was very good, except we over estimated the amount of pasta and ended up with more pasta than sauce, so it turned out kind of dry. Next time we will use more sauce, or less pasta.

The second recipe we tried was the Carrot Cake from page 284. We ended up using a whole can of pineapple for the topping instead of the Vanilla Bean Whip and it was very moist. It was taken to church for the impromptu potluck and mostly gone by the time we left afterwards. I think we will definitely be making that again. Next time we will try the Vanilla Bean whip on top and see what that’s like.

Yesterday, Josh made Corn Chowder off of page 93 for lunch, which he blended using an immersion blender that someone, either my mom or my friend gave me. It was slightly chunky, not meant to be smooth, and was very delicious. Next time we will make a double recipe, I think, and make it using the Vegetable stock from page 23 called for in the recipe. I forgot to make the stock in the morning before we left to go to the store so we used just water with a little miso and it was still good.

So far, the recipes we have tried have been fairly good. And I’m looking forward to trying some more of them.

I will try to remember to take some video or pictures of the next few recipes so you can see what they look like.

Til the nest time!