Reflection

By participating in Genius Hour, I learned a few new things. I learned how easy it was to change up my menu and try new foods. I learned how much fun it is to be creative in the kitchen. Finally, I learned how easy it would be to implement a Genius Hour Project within my future classroom, and how much fun it can be for my students. 

I learned that I do like trying new things and when I find something that I enjoy, it does not feel like work. Even though we had to write weekly posts, it was fun to write about what I had experienced that week. 

As a teacher, I have learned the importance of student choice, to an extent, and how much fun students can have when they are engaging in something that they are interested in. 

I think that genius Hour is a great instructional strategy. It incorporates technology in the classroom in a different way. Again, it also allows students to explore their interests, which makes all the difference in learning. 

For teacher candidates, I would say take advantage of the resources given to you. When it comes to Genius Hour, explore something that you are really interested in and you will have so much fun with your creation. 

My Genius Hour TEDTalk

Meal 4 - Not your Basic BBQ

The fourth and final meal is here. This week's meal post is a little bit different than usual. I had the chance to go home and spend some time with my family over the weekend. As a university student living away from home, I will take any opportunity to go home and see my family. This weekend just happened to be my dad's 60th birthday, so we had a fancier dinner. However, this is still a dinner that can be made from the comfort of my university home.

We indulged in steak, potatoes, green beans, and tomato salad. Was it ever delicious! This kind of meal is great because you have so many food groups incorporated into the dish. You have meat, veggies, and starch. It is also awesome because you can substitute the steak with a different type of meat or even fish!

This meal also does not take as much time as you think. The roasted potatoes take about 45 minutes to cook. You can use any kind of potato and just toss it with some olive oil, salt, and rosemary and its good to go in the oven. While that is cooking away, it gives you time to boil the green beans, slice the tomatoes and prep the steak with whatever seasoning you like. The green beans and tomatoes are simple. Once the beans are boiled, put them in a bowl with salt, oil, garlic, and parsley. The tomatoes, cut them dress them with oil, salt, oregano, garlic, and onions. As an Italian, you can see that we love oil and garlic. They are both such simple ingredients but can transform a meal.

As the potatoes are finishing up, you can throw the steaks on the bbq and cook them to your liking. Then you are ready to plate your meal and enjoy.



Another great thing about this meal is that it is perfect if you are meal prepping. Just make double the portions and you can pack it away in a container for lunch the next day ... which is exactly what I have done.

The past few weeks I have cooked different meals to expand my cooking horizon. As a university student, you get in a rut of cooking the same things because they are easy and familiar. But while cooking these different meals, I found myself getting so excited to cook and try something different.

I definitely will be repeating these meals in the future, but I would like to continue to try new and exciting recipes to spice up my dinner life!

Meal 3 - Asian

This week I decided I would spice things up a bit ... literally. On the menu this week was a sweet chili chicken, rice and veggies. It was a very Asian inspired meal. I must say it was delicious. I went out for sushi lunch yesterday and have decided to continue the Asian meal choices.

This dish was much easier than I thought it would be. Rice is rice, throw it in a pot, let it boil, lower the heat... it cooks itself, no extra work required. Veggies were simple as well. I pick my veggies based on what I enjoy, zucchini, bell peppers, carrot and snow peas. Toss them in a pan with some garlic, oil, and salt and you are good to go.

Now for the main event, the chicken. The most important thing to remember with the chicken is to not overcook it and you want nice chunky pieces. It is easy to overcook chicken, due to the fear of salmonella, but if you cook the chicken too much, it really dries it out. Another important thing to note when cooking the chicken is that you don't want to burn the chili sauce. To avoid doing this, you're going to cook the chicken twice. First, you want to coat your chicken in flour and cook it in some oil, this takes around 10 minutes. Once that is done, you are going to drain the pan and cover the bottom in sweet chili sauce. Once the sauce is bubbling, add in the chicken. You want to mix the chicken so it is evenly coated in the sauce. The key is to constantly mix the chicken so that it does not stick to the pan or burn. This is only about 5 minutes of cooking time. If you properly time everything, start cooking the rice and veggies at the same time, and when the rice water begins to boil, start cooking the chicken, everything should be ready at about the same time.



Next up, plate your dish. Some people like their rice and chicken separate, others put the chicken on the rice to get the sauce on the rice (In the photo, all items are separate so that they can all be seen, but I mixed my chicken and rice together right after). And boom there you have a delicious Asian inspired meal. The prep time took a little longer than anticipated, with cleaning and cutting all the veggies, cook time was quick, and clean up was not fun. There were so many pots, pans, cutting boards and other utensils used during the process (as to not cross-contaminate the raw meat and veggies). However, the prep and clean up was well worth it.

A great thing with this type of meal is that you can make double the amount and BAM lunch for tomorrow is already done!

Click here for a Sweet Chili Chicken recipe!

Meal 2 - Mexican

Everyone needs a taco Thursday every once in a while. Tonight was Mexican night and was it ever delicious. Tacos are so good but are a very rare dinner meal, and after eating tonight I remember why. So first I realized that I had no sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, ground beef, or tortillas. This meant that first, a grocery store run was needed.

Once I returned home, the cooking began. The beauty of tacos is that they really don't take that long to make.  While the ground beef is cooking (approximately 20 minutes), that gives you enough time to prep everything else. Shred the cheese, wash and cut the lettuce, make guac (from scratch of course), put a spoon in the sour cream and warm up the tortillas. The whole prep time of the tacos took no more than 20 minutes, and good thing because I was STARVING. After everything was prepped, my sue chefs (very hungry roommates) and I, set the table and began our taco making. Ou was it ever delicious. You start with one, then another, and next thing you know you've eaten five tacos and are on the verge of exploding. But it was so worth it.

But now the difficult part: the cleanup. Holy guacamole do tacos ever make a disaster. So many dishes were used in the prep, which meant so much to wash. As university students WITHOUT a dishwasher, this was not fun. Especially because we all felt like we were going to explode. But we worked through it together and once the dishes were down, we hit the couch.

Taco night is a family night. There are so many things to prepare, so everyone takes a job, making it super easy. There were a lot of laughs shared around the dinner table, especially when someone overloaded their taco and half of it would end up spilling out.

I would definitely recommend a taco night. It is so delicious and there are so many ways to modify it. You can use different veggies, chicken instead of beef or even go full vegetarian. I will definitely be making these again, but maybe only eat four.



Click here for a classic taco recipe!

Meal 1 - Italian

As an individual of Italian descent, it was only fitting that my first meal would be an Italian Dish. Pasta and meatballs. Does not get much better than that. This is such a simple yet delicious meal. This is a time-consuming dish, but it is well worth the wait. The only problem with this sauce and meatballs is that when a recipe comes from your Italian speaking nonna, she tends to write half of it in Italian and not put any measurements. Nonnas always say that "you put as much as you need." Which really does not help. So you just have to add the ingredients by taste.

To begin with the sauce. This takes about 3 - 4 hours to cook fully through. You start with just lightly browning garlic and onions in some oil and then adding 3 or 4 jars of your tomato puree. Add some salt, pepper, and oregano and you let the sauce boil. Once it begins to boil, lower the heat to medium, cover the pot and let it sit for a few hours. While this is cooking, its a perfect time to start the meatballs. These are easy, but a little messy. You take your ground sausage, toss it in with some salt, pepper, parsley, eggs, and breadcrumbs. Mix it all together and then make your balls. Once this is done, you can throw them in the saucepot and let them cook with the sauce. This allows the flavours from the sauce to really soak into the meatballs. Then all you have to do it let it sit for a few hours, and stir it occasionally. Once the sauce is all cooked, you can portion it in containers and freeze it so that the next time you want pasta, your sauce is already made.

One of the best things about fresh sauce is the smell. In a short time, your entire home smells like fresh sauce, and it feels like you have just walked into nonnas house.

Now while the sauce is cooking, that gives you more than enough time to clean up the mess from prepping the sauce and the meatballs and even gives you time to do some of those class readings that you have been dreading.

After about 4 hours, when your sauce has thickened up, you can start boiling some water for the pasta. The key is to add the salt to the pasta water once it has started boiling. Why? I have no clue. That is just what my nonna told me.

Cooking the pasta only takes about 15 minutes. And once that is done, it is time to plate.



It just looks so beautiful.
This is one of my favourite dishes to make and eat. As a student living away from home, this meal makes me feel like I am at home having Sunday dinner with my family.

I did share this meal with a roommate, who asked for seconds.... and thirds. Something that I learned is that you can never make too much pasta!

Click here for a pasta and meatballs recipe to try at home!

Welcome!

Welcome to my Genius Hour Blog! This blog will follow me, a university student, on a journey of food exploration. It is so easy to get stuck in a rut when it comes to cooking. You make things you like, that are not time consuming, because students just don't have the time. Cooking is a passion in my life, so I will be exploring recipes from countries around the world to spice up my menu.

Here is a little bit about me and who I am.

This is my Word Art Passion Cloud. It highlights the things in my life that I am most passionate about.

This Pinterest page is All About Me. There are things makeup who I am as an individual. 

Here's a short video pep talk!