When we set out as two non-cooks on a self-imposed project to actually cook recipes from Pinterest every Friday in January for our Friday Feasts, didn’t know what to expect. Would it change our lives? Would we discover that we secretly love cooking? Would our families come rushing to the dinner table to taste our lovingly created concoctions?
Well, we can now answer these questions with a resounding: NO.
It turns out we couldn’t be more thrilled that this is the last Friday in January. We are totally ready to hang up our potholders after today’s presentation.
Before we get to that, we have something ACTUALLY wonderful and food related to cover first.
The Lunch Project is a fantastic organization started by three moms in North Carolina to provide a hot lunch for the over 900 children at the Lemanyata Primary School near Arusha Town, Tanzania.
In Tanzania, teachers make due with three to four students to a desk, not enough books, and leaking roofs. Oh….and student teacher ratios of approximately 100:1. Yes, that was not a typo 100:1.
If that wasn’t enough barrier for these children to receive a good education, they are already often malnourished and must walk great distances to school. Can you imagine how difficult it is to learn under these conditions?
The Lunch Project aims to help these children by providing them with a hot meal at lunch. It even employs moms to make the meals, which gives their families much needed income.
How much money does it take to feed over 900 children a hot lunch? We thought it surely had to be a huge amount, something that was way out of the question for regular people. We were stunned when we realized that it really wasn’t.
During this Friday Feasts nightmare adventure, we realized one reason we don’t cook more. It’s kind of tiring. And lots of the recipes from our Feed Me, Mom board have like multiple ingredients. And by multiple, we mean more than three.
Thankfully, we have reached the last Friday in January and no one in our families have required medical intervention for food poisoning and our kitchens are still relatively intact. We haven’t even set off our smoke detectors once! Clearly, this whole endeavor was a win, and we should obviously quit while we are ahead. After all, without us to sustain the take-out industry, it will probably go under. We can’t have that kind of thing on our conscience, y’all.
Since Ashley already made Beef Burritos and Lisa already made Tilapia and a Cauliflower side dish, we decided it was only fair if we BOTH chose a recipe to make for our final week. The obvious category was dessert. After all, we were headed out on a girls’ weekend away at the beach, and there is nothing better than putting yummy treats and good girly, girl conversation together. We decided on cookies since they were easiest to pack. Lisa chose Lemon Crinkle Cookies, and Ashley chose Chocolate Chip Rolo Cookies.
Ashley took the plunge first. It got tricky quickly because it turns out that the recipe for the 
Rolo cookies called for making chocolate chip cookie dough from scratch. WHAT??!! Ashley’s eyes crossed when she got to the fourth ingredient. Let’s just say that a phone call was made to Lisa that involved a string of expletives and an alternate plan. Surely, the same cookies could be made by sticking a frozen Rolos in prepackaged cookie dough, right? Who would honestly know the difference? Turns out NOBODY. HA! Take that homemade cookie dough! So, a word of advice on this one…if you are looking for a cookie recipe that involves exactly two ingredients, then this is the one. Because, quite honestly, when you are eating a chocolate chip cookie with a Rolo in the middle, you don’t really care about the way it was made. All the fabulous ladies on the beach trip agreed that they were delicious. There was not a single cookie left over, and they fought over the crumbs.
Lisa started the lemon cookies only a few hours before leaving for the beach trip.
There is nothing like baking with the added bonus of time pressure! This recipe contained four ingredients (don’t be too impressed, one of them is cake mix so there is no scratch baking going on or anything). It turns out that these are the perfect cookies to make under a time crunch because they were SO EASY. Well, except for one thing. In the recipe they caution that the dough is “sticky”. Um, yeah. Sticky doesn’t even begin to cover it. She quickly figured out you have to plop a glob of dough in the powdered sugar and then ball it up from there. Oh, and the cookies smell a bit like lemon car air freshener while baking. But if that doesn’t bother you, then you should try these because the finished product is nothing short of heaven on a plate. At last count, Ashley ate somewhere in the neighborhood of 57 cookies. Everyone else had to split the remaining three cookies. Whatever.
Our final verdict on the Pinterest project is this:
Paula Deen and Rachel Ray have absolutely nothing to worry about. We’re pretty sure their careers are completely safe from us taking over their gigs! And needless to say, we still have Domino’s Pizza on speed dial!
