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May 2024
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Week 12: Wrapping everything up!5/28/2024 For the conclusion of our genius hour project, we will be doing a podcast setup to go over all of the things we have done and learned during this project. We will be talking about our ratings and how it was to cook all of the meals. One of our challenges during this project was that we had some trouble with finding time to get together on the days we were supposed to go out to eat and cook the meals because Hannah and Lilly always had practice or games for their sports. Every time we went to a restaurant, we all met and then Hannah drove us there to make it easier. Looking back, something that would have been smart to do was to take pictures of our receipts from the restaurant and the store and keep track of the cost of this project because that was also a big factor in this. We tried to keep our budget in mind because we didn’t want to go super crazy since we all had limited money to use, whether it was our own money or our parents. A big part of our project and one of the reasons that we did it was to get out of our comfort zone and learn how to be out in the real world on our own and learn how to manage things ourselves. We also learned valuable lessons and cooking skills that will help us in the future. In conclusion, I think we all really enjoyed this project and how it all worked out. There were definitely some hiccups along the way but overall we think we did a pretty good job with this project and it definitely had an impact on our real lives.
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Week 11: Recreating Olive Garden5/28/2024 This week we met at hannah's house to make chicken alfredo. This was the first week where we were able to meet for a genius hour right after school with no sports interfering. Lilly and Hannah went straight to Hannah's house right after school but had to wait on Maggie for around 30 minutes because she had a few errands to run after school. To save a little time Lilly and Hannah cooked the noodles before Maggie got there, we started by boiling them on high for eight minutes. We used fettuccine noodles. Again to save time we bought pre-made alfredo sauce and had to cook that for 10 minutes on high. Overall this meal only took around 20 minutes to make completely. This was one of our favorite meals that we made considering it is one of our favorite meals to eat. We added a lot of spices and seasonings to spice up the dish like garlic powder, salt, and pepper. We all agreed this was our best meal, we all rated the dish a 10/10. This was the most simple meal we have made and it was the best. It's hard to tell now if we are just making really easy meals or if our cooking skills have improved, but we're going to go with our skills. Once we got about halfway through our genius hour project we got extremely tired and we were just all over school so we got behind on our blogs by a lot. We tried using time in class to work on the blogs but it was hard to do considering we couldn't concentrate in the classroom or the hall so we would end up forgetting about them. We finally started to catch up and uploaded all our blogs towards the end of the 12 weeks.
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Week 10: Eating at Olive Garden5/28/2024 For this week we all went to Olive Garden. We got the kids fettuccine alfredo. It was raining that day so we all decided to ride together to be safer and save some gas. We met at Food Lion on a Saturday and everyone got in Hannah’s car and she drove us. We were a little nervous to drive to Winston just because of the traffic and the weather. It ended up not being a bad drive and we got there pretty quickly. Our service was really good. The hostess was very kind and greeted us. We immediately got sat and our waiter was very nice. He came and got our drink orders we all got water. He then brought breaksticks to the table. Hannah ordered the nromal meal which came with a salad that we al shared. She got rigatoni with five cheese marinara. Lilly and Maggie got the kids meal alfredo. That was the dish we attempted to recreate.
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Week 9: Recreating Venezia's5/28/2024 So for week 9, we planned to recreate the pizza from Venezias. We got a pepperoni pizza for us to split and Maggie and Hannah got a salad. We met at Lilly’s house to cook and make sure we had all of our ingredients, which were dough, homemade pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, pepperonis, and oregano. We started out by rolling the dough out after putting a lot of flour on the counter, which took a while because we had trouble with it sticking to the rolling pin. Next, we sprayed the baking sheet with cooking spray and transferred the dough onto that, and added the rest of our toppings. We baked the pizza for about 15 minutes and we think it actually turned out pretty good for the first time making a pizza for all of us!
We also made our own salads, which we really enjoyed. We had cheese, cucumbers, croutons and caesar dressing for Maggie and Lilly and ranch for Hannah. In conclusion, none of us really enjoyed the pizza we made because we all thought it had a weird taste to it. Hannah rated the taste a 7/10 and the accuracy a 4/10, Lilly rated the taste a 5/10 and the accuracy a 4/10, and Maggie rated the taste a 6/10 and the accuracy a 4/10. We didn’t think it was accurate to the Venezia pizza at all, and the crust was very dry, probably because we added too much flour to the dough. Next week we plan to go to Olive Garden and have a little collab with @behindthecamvlogs so stay tuned for that! We are very excited because we love Olive Gardens pasta and breadsticks!
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Week 8: Eating at Venezia4/29/2024 For week eight we went to Venezia. We got behind on time last week so we went on Thursday the day after we cooked the teriyaki chicken. We all met up at the school after sports, and Hannah drove us to Venezia’s in Advance. When we got there we all ordered water, Hannah and Maggie got salads, and we all shared a small pepperoni pizza. There weren’t many people in the Restaurant and it was quiet, so filming our videos was a little weird. There wasn't anything special about our order this week. It was just a pepperoni pizza, we all enjoyed it and rated it a 7/10.
This should be pretty easy to make and should be quick. We have been struggling to make time for this project, with our busy schedules. So hopefully we can find a day that works for all of us to make this pizza. Our waiter's name was Adam, he used to go to Davie and recognized us. We put him in our video, and he said that our videos were “ lame”. So we decided to make them a little more interesting. We put one of our numbers on a napkin after we had paid our bills. Around two hours later one of us got a text from him. We didn’t know what to say because we just wanted to make our videos a little more interesting. So we only responded once but he continued to text us. It has been about a week now and he finally has stopped texting us. So I think we succeeded in making our videos more interesting. This was our eighth week of Genius Hour and this week was a successful, easy week! See you next week for week nine at Lilly's house where we will make the pepperoni pizza!
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Week 7: Recreating Shiki4/17/2024 For this week we went to Hannah’s house and made the copycat shiki teriyaki chicken. We went on a Wednesday since that’s when all our schedules worked out. There was a few preparation steps involved. We had to first make the teriyaki sauce. This took a couple of tries to get the right flavor and consistency. After some trial and error, we got our sauce how we wanted it.
We then prepped the chicken by cutting the fat off the sides and cutting the chicken into cubes. We also went ahead and cooked our rice in a rice cooker to speed up the process. After everything was prepped we assembled the ingredients into separate containers. We got out the sauces and seasonings needed to cook everything on the Blackstone. Before cooking we heated up the blackstone by turning on the gas tank and turning on all the burners. Before putting all the ingredients onto the Blackstone, we put a layer of olive oil on it to prevent sticking. We also added a bit of soy sauce and teriyaki to add flavor while cooking. We then started by cooking the chicken. Hannah put the chicken on the Blackstone and started to cook it. We ran into a bit of trouble because the soy sauce started sizzling and popping off the Blackstone and onto her. She turned down the heat and we got it all figured out. We cooked the chicken for about 6 minutes and once that was done we added the rice. The rice cooked a lot quicker than the chicken and was done in about 2 minutes. After letting the rice cook we placed everything in a pan together and brought it inside. We then made our plates and added the teriyaki sauce to our dish. This meal was overall really good and definitely was our best one yet.
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Week 6: Eating at Shiki3/29/2024 For week 6, we went to Shiki and all got different meals. Maggie got the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables, Lilly got the hibachi chicken with rice and vegetables, and Hannah got the teriyaki shrimp with rice and vegetables. We had a little bit of a scheduling problem, so Maggie got there late, after the food arrived. It turned out that Lilly and Hannahs food was not very good so that’s pretty disappointing, but because of that we decided to recreate the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables for week 7. Hannah had to leave a little bit early because she had somewhere to be, so Lilly stayed with Maggie while she finished eating and then they left. All in all, Shiki was probably our most expensive meal yet, but that’s probably because we all got 3 separate dishes and didn’t split a meal this time. All of the dishes were around $10, and we all got water, but if we hadn’t it would have been about $13.
For the atmosphere, there was pretty much nobody at Shiki because we went right after school. It was us and maybe 5 other people so it was very quiet and our waiters were very nice. We will all be out of town for spring break on week 7 so we will actually have to double up on week 8 and do the cooking and the next restaurant in the same week, which might be a challenge because we already have trouble trying to come up with one day to meet up together, and now we will have to come up with two days. Anyways, tune in next time to see us cook the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables and see if we can measure up to the real thing. Bye!
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Week 5: Recreating La Carreta3/29/2024 This week we were at Lilly’s house and we recreated the La Careta ACP. We first started by gathering all of the ingredients needed to recreate the ACP. The main ingredients were chicken, queso, and rice. To start we had to prepare the chicken which was time-consuming and it wasn't pleasant touching the raw chicken. Once the chicken was prepped we put it on a cast iron skillet and started to cook it. After it had been cooked we then added the rice and queso and this mostly was all we had to do other than adding the spices. This wasn't the best we had done but it wasn't the worse. Hannah and Maggie enjoyed it, Lilly not so much but she doesn't like cheese so that why she didnt like it. Maggie and Hannah rated it a 7 overall for taste and accuracy and Lilly rated it a 4. We had made a mistake of adding to much spice to it, so it was a little more spicy then the original which through off the taste a little bit. This week it was a struggle trying to find a time when we were all avalible. We ended up doing this on a Wednesday, after we looked at all of our sports scedules and things. We all drove separately after practices and things, and met at Lillys house. This was a quck and easty meal to make and didnt require a lot of materials or money to make.
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Week 4: Eating at La Carreta3/29/2024 For week 4 we went to La Caretta and got the ACP. This is a Mexican dish and it stands for arroz con pollo. This dish contained rice, cheese dip, and chicken. We went on a Saturday and all drove separately. We tried to be considerate of the price and make things as cheap as possible for us so we all split it. Ava Jane was hanging out with Lilly that day so she tagged along and got enchiladas.
The dish overall was really tasty. It is a big dish for one so splitting it was a good choice. Our waiter was really nice and kept checking in on us regularly. Maggie and Hannah got a water to drink and Lilly got Mr Pibb. Ava Jane also got a Mr Pibb. The restaurant was really loud that day since there was a party beside our table so filming was kind of hard. We saw a lot of people we knew eating since it was a Saturday. We went and said hey to some of our friends Zowie, and Stella. We decided to go to the La Carreta in Advance because we all think their food tastes better and Lilly and Hannah were already in the area. We went around 6:30 and it took about 10 minutes to get our food. The service was really good and they were really quick with everything which made the experience better. Lilly is not a big fan of cheese so she didn’t really enjoy it, but she said it was okay. We had to go on a Saturday because me and Lilly had games pretty much taking up our whole week. It has been a bit difficult to coordinate our schedules but I think we're making it work pretty well. Next week we are going to cook at Lilly's house.
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Week 3: Recreating Chang Thai3/11/2024 For week three, our goal was to try to recreate the Drunken Noodles from Chang Thai. We started by finding a recipe online that was similar to the dish we ate and then we gathered all of the ingredients we would need. Overall, I would say the price for the ingredients wasn’t that bad because each of us would have spent around $6 for what we got. We all went to Hannah's house and started cooking. First, we boiled the noodles and then we mixed up the sauce by using three or four different oils and sauces and finally we cooked the broccoli and the carrots to add them in.
When we were finally done cooking, we dished up the food and sat down to see how well we had recreated the Drunken Noodles. All of us thought the noodles were pretty good as far as the taste but not very accurate compared to the dish at Chang Thai. Our ratings were around 6-8/10 for flavor and 5-7/10 for accuracy. Part of this could have been the fact that we made a few adjustments to the recipe, like adding a few more tablespoons of brown sugar and chili sauce, but even though it didn’t turn out exactly how we thought it would, we learned some valuable lessons for the next dish we make. In conclusion, we are done with our first part of Genius hour, the dinner, and the recreation. The next restaurant we have on our schedule is La Carreta on Wednesday and we are all looking forward to that! We are planning to get an ACP and try to recreate that, which we think will go a lot better than the Drunken Noodles. See you next week! |