Cooking Challenge

A cooking challenge is a fun idea that can inspire you to learn new recipes and discover foods and flavors that you have not tried before. Besides eating yummy food you get to improve your cooking skills, increase your knowledge of all things kitchen related, and perhaps experience important parts of other cultures.

Monthly Cooking Challenge

Depending on your time commitment, you can ease your way into learning new things by going with a monthly cooking challenge. Find a new recipe to try one night every month. Maybe throw in some new cooking techniques that look interesting. Have you ever tried cooking bacon in the oven? Pizza on the grill? Have you tried making Egg Drop soup? How many ways can you cook an egg?

You can keep it simple by finding recipes that fit under the same kind of theme for the year. You can choose themes based on regions or cooking styles, like Italian. Another idea is to choose a theme like a certain type of dish like pizza, pasta, or fish. Think about areas that you would like to learn more about or techniques that would be great to learn and use for lots of other dishes.

Theme ideas

Maybe try a simple dish from lots of different regions. Tacos, how many ways? Bocas from Costa Rica, Thai tacos, Korean tacos, Hawaiian fish tacos, Mexican street tacos… I may have found my next challenge! Also, how about ramen noodles? Just imagine all the different flavor profiles you can create. Salad may sound boring, but you can get really creative with salads. Spinach and strawberry salad, caprese salad, grilled chicken on a bed of romaine… Also they can be so healthy and great for your waist line. Also… Pizza! Pizza italian style with tomatos, basil, and prosciutto. Spanish style pizza with chorizo, cilantro, and black olives. Greek pizza with green olives, feta, and pork sausage. Mexican pizza with grilled steak, bell pepper, and onion. Asian style with shiitake mushroom, garlic, and zuchinni. So many possibilities there.

If you want to be a little more adventurous, you can focus on just one region for the year and find specific recipes from that place for each month. This way you can get more in-depth knowledge and skills by trying more complicated recipes. Look for recipes and types of foods that define a region like Latin…Thai…Southern BBQ.

Here are some more themes that you may want to include in your cooking challenge:

• South America
• African
• Indian
• Chinese
• Breakfast
• Snacks
• Cocktails/Boatdrinks
• Seafood
• Desserts
• Bread
• Cake
• Coffee
• Cupcakes
• Soup
• Bacon
• Potato
• Salsa
• Herbs
• Spices

Weekly Cooking Challenge

For those of you that really get inspired you can try a weekly cooking challenge, like cooking something new every Friday night. This means learning 52 new things about cooking over the span of a year. If you choose a different theme each month you could make 4 recipes under that theme and really learn some valuable skills. The hardest part would probably be coming up with a list of everything you want to try. If you do not like the rigidity of a list, you can write your themes, recipe ideas, or cooking techniques on a set of 3×5 cards that you can shuffle and pick from as you go through the year. This cool dry erase deck of cards seems like just the right size.

Dry Erase Blank Cards (Amazon.com)

Maybe your friends would be interested in joining your challenge. You can make a Facebook group for your cooking challenge and share recipes and foodie photos.

One item that has helped me to enjoy cooking this year has been a magnetic chalkboard menu. It sticks on the refrigerator and then I use liquid chalk pens to write out the “Weekly Specials.”

Magnetic Chalkboard Menu (Amazon.com)

Liquid Chalk Markers (Amazon.com)

What kind of cooking challenge sounds interesting to you?