When it is hot outside, I do not feel like standing over a stove making elaborate meals. Between the heat and our crazy June schedule, our meals have been much more low-key than usual.  We have been running between camps, classes, Bible school, and quick trips so much this month that we also have not been sticking to our normal cooking schedule, so here are a few quick meals the kids have recently made.

Breakfast for Dinner

My oldest is taking an Iron Chef class through the school’s summer program. One of the recipes he was assigned was for breakfast bites.  His assignment was very similar to this recipe from AllRecipes, except he used Canadian bacon instead of bacon.  The 5-year-old had been wanting to make pancakes, so we decided to combine the two and have a breakfast for dinner night. My kids love when we do that!

The breakfast bites were… okay. He followed the recipe given to him by his teacher to the letter, but they were a bit biscuit-y. Usually, we make our biscuits from scratch, but since this was for his class assignment, he had to use the provided refrigerated dough. I don’t think this is a recipe he would make again without some tweaking. Part of his class was submitting a video documenting his cooking – here it is!

 

Typically we also make our pancakes from scratch using the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. However, we had recently toured a working mill at College of the Ozarks and purchased a mix from there. We used the mix, but I didn’t feel like standing over a hot stove all evening, so I thought I’d try the sheet pan pancakes. It wasn’t my best idea. Due to using the mix, the texture was almost cornbread-like. I’m intrigued by the idea, though, and plan to follow this recipe from The Flavor Bender. It looks delicious!

We paired our pancakes and breakfast bites with some fresh fruit to complete the meal. Somehow, we managed not to get any pictures of the finished product, though!

BLTs

Is there a more perfect summer meal than a BLT? I don’t think so! My 9-year-old feels the same, so we decided to run to the local farmers market and gather what he needed for his dinner plan.

Full disclosure – we didn’t buy bacon, we got fresh side instead. My husband prefers fresh side, which is uncured, not smoked pork belly. We still called them BLTs, though!

R sliced the bread and tomatoes, washed and prepared the lettuce, and shucked the corn. I quickly took over the fresh side cooking duties as it tends to pop and I didn’t want him to get burned.

*Side note – we bought bread because I have lost my bread baking mojo. I can’t seem to bake a decent loaf now and am not sure what happened. If you have a favorite, fail-proof bread recipe, please share it!

 

We added some watermelon to complete our perfect summer meal. We even dined outside on the patio to complete the experience.

 

Ranch Chicken Sliders

The 7-year-old loves ranch! She won’t eat ketchup. mustard, barbecue sauce, or even (GASP!) Chick-Fil-A sauce, but she will put ranch on almost everything. When we were discussing what she wanted to cook for her night, she told me, “Something with ranch.” After some perusing on Pinterest, she settled on this recipe for Crockpot Ranch Chicken, However, instead of using Hidden Valley Ranch mix, we made our own using this recipe. Since A had theater camp all day, she made the mix and put her meal in the crockpot before she left.

 

We had a package of Hawaiian sweet rolls, so we decided to serve the ranch chicken as sliders and paired it with a veggie tray and fresh fruit. I’m not going to lie, I was disappointed in this recipe. I’m not sure if it is because we made our own ranch mix or not, but the chicken was very bland. The boys put barbecue sauce on their sandwiches to make them more flavorful.

There is no picture of the final product as my little chef was so exhausted from a full week of camp, that she fell asleep before we could get one!