Noah's First Fondue

Mr. Tart and I recently joined some friends from grad school for a fondue dinner. We brought the chocolate dessert fondue, very traditional, and Cynde and Todd provided the swiss cheese fondue with bread and veggies. Our fearless hosts, completely undaunted by the prospect of serving fondue for the first time to a French teacher, decided to experiment a bit to avoid that whole meat-dipped-in-boiling-oil thing for the main course. Katie found a recipe for grilled steak brushed with pesto dipped into a blue cheese cream sauce (which made Mr. Tart a very happy man). Doesn't it look good?

We all loved all of it. The biggest fan, though, was perhaps two-year-old Noah, who delighted in the fruit and chocolate. We thought it dangerous to give him a fondue fork, seeing as he doesn't yet have the manual dexterity for something so long and pointy, so Katie just put the pre-dipped food on his plate:

Isn't he just the cutest thing you've ever seen at the dinner table? His enthusiasm soon spread:

And here's the "after" picture. The dinner party was clearly a rousing success! After all, nothing says "good party" like chocolate up one's nose.