Working Together- Cheese Cake

The kids have not cooked as much lately as before. Life's just gotten busy. But not too busy to do every day stuff. But more likely than not, the kids and I work in a team to cook now, rather than me just working with one child or them doing it simply by following the recipe. With only the three youngest in the house now, following the recipe alone isn't likely to happen.

Two things we made recently have several steps and were more fun in a group. One was cheesecake from my grandmother's recipe. The other was chicken stir fry.

I don't know if you've ever had this happen--you go through old recipes that have been used for two or three generations and there are no amounts given. Add a pinch of this, a jar of that. At the time the recipe was written, there was probably only one size jar of something, but now it comes in four sizes of cans! So I've made my best guess.

Cheese Cake 

8 oz cream cheese              large pack lemon jello

1 c sugar                             1 c boiling water

1 tsp vanilla                        12 oz can of condensed milk

Graham cracker Ready Crust

Chill condensed milk. 

Combine boiling water with dry jello mix.

Set aside. 

Mix sugar, cream cheese and vanilla. 

Add jello mixture and whip. Set aside. 

Whip condensed milk. 

Combine with cheeseand jello mixture. Whip. 

Spoon into crust. Chill three hours.

You need three bowls for this. One for the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla. One for the condensed milk. One for the jello mixture.

The white bowl is the condensed  milk whipped. We used to use "milnot" which really whipped up foamy. They don't make it anymore. This time we used Walmart's Great Value brand.

Since the twins are learning fractions, we cut these in half, then fourths, then eighths and talked about size differences and how any number over itself is always one. We also talked about improper fractions--like when there is more than a whole cheesecake left. At that time we had 9/8 cheese cake left, and they were able to understand that 9/8 is the same as 1 1/8.

You can add toppings. We usually top with blueberry pie filling.

I will post the stir fry pictures next time. I just realized that we made it wrong the last two times! We left out the water and bullion. I created the recipe using a combination of ones we found online, so I don't have clear directions. I think we found most of them too blah and added chicken broth made of water and bullion, and I didn't do that the last two times. That explains the "blah" taste!