raise your sippy cup and say "cheers" with Carl, the future foodie!

My nephew Carl, age 19 months, talks about food constantly--in French, no less! Swing by Bringing up Baby Bilingual and see how he can sweet-talk me into giving him grapes or clinking crackers.

the budding gourmand

My nephew Carl recently turned one year old. His birthday cake was actually gingerbread cupcakes which Elizabeth adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe; he wolfed two of them down and chased them with ice cream and laughed.

Why gingerbread? Well, a neighbor had given their family a plate of various cookies just before Christmas, so Carl's parents fed him a soft gingerbread cookie. When it was gone, he sobbed and cried real tears. They held up the plate to show that the gingerbread was all gone, and he continued to wail. So they handed him the plate to make it clear that no more cookies were left. And what did Carl do? He started licking the plate!

Here he is with the cupcakes:

Can't you tell that he love gingerbread? His other favorites include bananas (he can even say "nana" when he sees one!) and ice cream and carrots and apple juice.

egg on our face

Okay, so this is embarassing to admit: this post refers to a Supper Club dinner party from ten months ago. And I'm not going to try to cover it up, because it was an egg-themed potluck at Easter time and here's the bunny we saw outside the hosts' house and took a picture of because it seemed like a good omen for the meal! So here we go.
Cynde and Atley (Katie and Aaron's daughter, who was docile and not walking then, but is now a drama queen toddler) think happy thoughts about the cholesterol-filled repast awaiting them:

We all went overboard on the appetizers this time. Katie made garlic-stuffed olives wrapped in pastry dough (they're egg-shaped, see?) while my contribution was a plethora of international eggy hors-d'oeuvres. For example, we had several types of deviled eggs: Indian (pierced with pieces of pappadam and served with tamarind sauce), Mexican (flavored with jalapenos and cumin and decorated with tortilla chips), and plain old American.

Then I made mini-quiches with broccoli (French) and Scotch eggs (hard-boiled eggs wrapped in a sausage-bread crumb mixture and deep fried).

Unfortunately, none of us can remember the main dish in any detail, other than it was a kind of egg casserole. Oh well! Dessert also exploited eggs to their fullest, in Katie's sweet, custardy "Bob and Andy pie" from an Amish cookbook.

Full tummies, happy friends--yet another successful themed potluck dinner party!

cooking with kids

I've been tutoring a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and their mom in French for a semester now. One night a week we have a "cooking class" in French, where I teach them the necessary vocabulary and they follow my directions to prepare something simple and sweet that they can eat right away. (We meet after dinner, so it's supposed to be a dessert.) And I'm running out of ideas! Here's a list of what we've done so far (that I can remember); can anyone else suggestion other hands-on, kid-friendly desserts? (They don't actually have to be French.)

"bananes royales" (banana splits)
palmiers (rolled-up puff pastry sliced into cookies)
croissants (refrigerated crescent rolls that they rolled up themselves)
crepes (I made those and the girls added the toppings)
French toast
spider crackers
parfaits (with yogurt, granola, and fruit)
strawberry shortcake
cookies (from a refrigerator tube, which we decorated with icing after slicing and baking them--baking cookies from scratch with two preschoolers would take up all the time we had for lessons!)
cinnamon toast
ants on a log
fruit dipped in chocolate

so much more than Swedish meatballs!

Meet Tucker, Cynde and Todd's baby, born last summer. This was his first dinner party with us and Katie and Aaron (our three-couple Supper Club)! He's making a face because he doesn't approve of the hors-d'oeuvres at our Scandinavian-themed potluck.

But who can blame him when confronted with caviar in a tube?

Fortunately, the other appetizers were more appetizing: Danish blue cheese and home-smoked salmon (Todd's first attempt with his in-laws' smoker turned out quite well!).

And while Katie's canned goodies included quite a few jalapenos (she's a Spanish teacher, after all), she correctly pointed out that Scandinavians are all about pickling. (I liked her pickled green beans the best.)

Side dishes included rye bread (from Schmidt's Bakery and Deli in Loveland--geniuses with flour) and lingonberry jam,

plus potatoes swimming in cream and more pickled veggies (beets this time).

The main dish--whose name I can't recall--was like a big ol' Swedish meatball in a pastry crust. After all that good food, we were ready for a long winter's nap, but wait! There's still dessert!

We concluded the meal with the creaminess of rice pudding and the crunchiness of Swedish rosettes, which I fried in hot oil on our deck just like my mother used to do every Christmas. (Now I understand why she stopped--they're really time-consuming and don't last till the following morning! That's a lot of work for something so delicate and ephemeral.)



Other than the grody caviar, it was another delicious and inventive dinner! We try to get together like this every two months or so, sometimes with their kids, sometimes just us grown-ups. We always pledge to experiment with new recipes (and we always go overboard and end up with way more food than we can actually eat). We used to do Iron Chef-style meals, where we all had to prepare dishes using the theme ingredient (eg squash, tomatoes, fondue, aphrodisiacs), but now we're moving into regional cuisine instead. Stay tuned for an egg dinner post followed by Indian food! I'll try to get caught up before our next dinner: raclette in March.

Iron Chef a la Colorado

Remember adorable Noah, the budding three-year-old gourmet? Well, he's back with zucchini!

Cynde, Katie, and I--and our hubbies--decided that our next group Supper Club effort would be a Harvest Dinner to celebrate autumn in Colorado and that all dishes had to include the theme ingredient of ... squash! Both winter and summer squash would be acceptable. Here's what we came up with:

Appetizers: Breaded and baked zucchini and yellow squash rounds with three dipping sauces: ranch, pesto, and tomato sauce. (This has turned into my favorite recipe for summer squash--it gets me my fried food fix without actually counteracting the benefits of fresh veggies by deep frying them. Thanks, "Cooking Light" magazine!)

Main dish: Savory flan made with winter squash. (Cynde, you'll have to remind me which squash it was and what its delicious but funny-sounding sauce was called.)

Side dishes: Zucchini bread and summer squash ribbons.

Dessert: Pumpkin custard. (Ack--no photo! Sorry, Katie.)

So was the harvest meal a success? Let's ask Noah!

Noah, pre-zucchini bread:

Noah, post-zucchini bread:

Next up: a dinner in December with ginger as the theme ingredient. Stay tuned!

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.