In the Kitchen - S'mores on a Saturday Night

What to do on a Saturday night?  Well it is cold and snowy.. a perfect time for a fire in the fireplace and hunkering down inside with family.  Yes we have a television in the family room but we only occasionally sit down and watch tv.  What I would rather do than that is to create something in the kitchen with Journey.  It is a great mother/daughter bonding time, it teaches her things and the outcome can be SO YUMMY.

So last Saturday night as we started the fire going, Journey announced she was hungry for S'mores.  HMMM... marshmallows have not been in my cupboard for a very long time.. they are full of corn syrup and who knows what else...  commercial chocolate is just crap full of soy oil, soy lecithin and chemical preservatives... and graham crackers?  Well I did have a very old leftover box of graham crackers in the cupboard but shudder to actually eat them.  (one would advise that I should throw them away but since I very seldom throw anything away, they sit in the cupboard for "emergencies")

So it is just a good thing I have a well stocked pantry full of the raw ingredients that are most common in recipes like organic turbinado sugar, organic cane sugar, honey, sprouted wheat berries, homemade vanilla, milk, etc.  We decided to try a new experiment together and see if we could make our own Smores ingredients from scratch.  2 1/2 hours later and a decimated kitchen full of clean up work, we had our first S'more.

While it was really messy and a bit time consuming, I have to tell you I would not trade that 2 1/2 hours working with Journey in the kitchen for a fast, commercially adulterated S'more and it was TONS tastier!  This was the first time I had tried a fresh homemade marshmallow and I will never go back.  In fact, I plan to make another batch this week and surprise my sister and family with chocolate dipped fresh marshmallows at her birthday party... but that is tomorrow's project.

While I doubted if I could produce a real graham cracker myself, they were also delicious and enough like store-bought graham crackers to be great with S'mores.

The chocolate bars were probably the least like store-bought chocolate but flavorful and rich, just the same.  In fact, every day this week, Journey has taken a small piece of chocolate, a marshmallow, and a graham cracker in her lunch for a special treat.  She says the kids try to trade their food for hers and she won't let them.  But we have had the opportunity to share a bit with some non-family members and the marshmallows, especially, are getting rave reviews!

How to's and recipes will follow in subsequent blog posts today so stay tuned and bookmark the marshmallow blog for sure!  You will want to try this one yourself... and include your little ones in the making.. it was so much fun and who knew you could make them yourself?