Another year, another Genius Hour project. For the uninitiated, Genius Hour is a project that is hardly original, though anecdotally, it does seem as if perhaps the idea of it isn't as popular as it used to be. Regardless, a lot of my students have found benefit to completing the assignment over the years, and the same can be said for me as I have often found occasion to do the project with my students. This year is no exception to that rule, so join me (and my students) over the next twelve weeks and let's see what we produce! As For Me, It's a Cooking ProjectOver the years, I've found that projects involving cooking, athletics, and music have tended to be some of the most popular for students to choose. Some of that is because these projects seem like they'll be easier on the surface, but I maintain that this is only true if a person doesn't take the time to plan out all the details and consider things like data collection or how they will measure their growth. In this light, it feels appropriate to make sure that my project actually fulfills all that criteria if I want to have a leg to stand on. So, some background on my project. During quarantine, I spent quite a bit of time watching cooking videos on YouTube. Gordon Ramsay's video on making scrambled eggs is what really started me on my own cooking journey (well, that and recognizing that some of my favorite restaurants didn't handle the transition to a take-out-only model particularly well). Since then, I have taken on significantly more of the cooking duties at my house and have loved it. This interest in cooking led me down quite a few rabbit holes on YouTube, sending me to channels like Ethan Chlebowski, The Babish Culinary Universe, Pro Home Cooks, Sam the Cooking Guy, and You Suck at Cooking among others. I've spent quite a bit of time watching these videos, and I've also tried quite a few of their recipes or used their ideas as motivation to experiment with dishes. Yeah, But What Are You Doing This Time?In the past few months, my wife and I have followed the advice of seemingly every Youtuber with a sponsorship on their video and signed up for Hello Fresh (I don't have a promo code for you, sorry). This has been fantastic for giving us access to high quality ingredients and inventive recipes that can almost exclusively be made in 40 minutes or less. It's an awesome idea that got both of us out of our comfort zones, but nothing is free, as they say. Hello Fresh came with its own set of problems. Yes, we had fresh ingredients, but to stay within a reasonable price range, our boxes only came with enough ingredients for two servings (meaning no leftovers). Additionally, while I had initially hoped that paying for Hello Fresh boxes would cut out some costs at the grocery store, we found that any decrease to our grocery budget was minimal, and we often found ourselves at the end of the week lacking in ingredients to make other dishes. All this considered, I have a few goals I want to accomplish over these next twelve weeks, and I will do this through a few specific challenges. Goal 1: Better BudgetingSince one of the reasons we decided to cut back on Hello Fresh is because of budgetary concerns, one goal I have over the next few weeks is to minimize the amount of money spent on food in any given week while maintaining the quality of the food that we're eating (no unhealthy substitutes for the sake of saving money). To accomplish this, we have already cut out the Hello Fresh boxes. But beyond this, I also plan to begin reincorporating meal prep into my routine any given week. I experimented with this idea a bit last year as I tried to gradually build myself up to having a majority of my meals in any given week be home-cooked. The idea is that I can use some time on Saturday and Sunday of each week to prepare a few dishes or meal components in advance that can be pulled out throughout the week and easily incorporated into any given recipe. In other words, I'd like to replace what Hello Fresh was doing for me by pre-portioning out fresh ingredients by doing my own prep when I have more free time to ensure that I don't stress myself out on cooking throughout the week and keep both quality and variety in my meals each week. In doing all this, I should be able to both better budget my time and my funds. I will save money by cutting out Hello Fresh, but I will also be saving time by taking into consideration ahead of time what I want to make in a given week and preparing components in advance. Goal 2: Keeping it QualityEating Hello Fresh recipes was often a revelatory experience. I loved so many of those dishes, and many of them were some of the best things I had made in my own house. So, just because I'm not paying for the boxes doesn't mean I can't keep doing the recipes, right? That will be another part of this project. After I've gotten into a sort of routing regarding the meal prep, I will start choosing some of my favorite Hello Fresh recipes from the past few months and will try my best to recreate those using our own ingredients and keeping within our budgetary restrictions.
Each dish will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 as we go, and by the end of the project we will hopefully have reincorporated some of the best parts of what we had from our previous Hello Fresh adventure into our new budget. I imagine that this will be quite a bit more challenging than I am fully anticipating, but I think it will be a worthwhile endeavor that will allow for some significant improvement. So, here's to some good cooking, and here's to Genius Hour!
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AuthorMr. Barker is a high school English teacher, and this website is his contribution to his classes' Genius Hour projects. ArchivesCategories |