Snowball Soup by Mercer Mayer

Skill Level: Easy

This week is another I Can Read book: Snowball Soup by Mercer Mayer.  When my daughter was a toddler, Little Critter was her favorite character.  We would read the stories for bedtime, for wake up time, for incentive, for lazy days.  So I thought I’d had my fill of Little Critter stories, but then, 28 years passed and I remembered why my daughter liked them so much.  They’re just stories about a kid, who does normal kid stuff, has normal kid days, normal kid friends, normal kid pets, normal kid problems and normal kid solutions.

 The boys proved me correct in my assessment.  Look Grummy, he has a hat just like mine.  Look Grummy, Dog jumps up just like OurCricket and OurBeasley do.  Their mommy made them put on boots too.

The title of the story really set the menu.  Snowball Soup is about a normal kid day playing in normal kid snow.  Little Critter and his sister make a snowman and fix some snowball soup for him.  Unfortunately, Dog finds he likes snowball soup.

 

So we start with soups that have white orbs floating around in them.  Ok, maybe it sounds better if I say a white bean chili.  Well, beans aren’t really that round, so maybe we’ll add some ground turkey meatballs.  I started with some instant grits, an egg and ground turkey.  I added a small amount of chopped green onions, about 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise, and some salt and pepper.

 

 

I spent about 3 seconds wondering if I could have the boys help roll the meatballs, since just about any age can roll a ball.  But then I remembered that this was raw poultry, and there was no way I could keep the youngest from trying to eat it.  So made the meatballs, rolling them pretty small.  About the size of an olive so that they would cook up quickly in a nice vegetable broth.  I added some canned navy beans which I'd rinsed.   My sister convinced me that my leftover stellini and pastini (the little pasta stars I’ve used for other story meals) would make great snowflakes, so we added some of those near the end of the cooking since they’re so tiny they cook quickly.

 

I decided to make biscuits in little balls of three graduated sizes.  Perfect for stacking as snowmen.  I wasn’t sure if they’d actually stay stacked, but I figured that the boys would laugh a lot at the biscuits rolling off of the stack if they fell.  It turned out that because they had a slightly flat bottom, they stacked beautifully, but if you’re worried, you can put a dab of cream cheese or butter in between them.  The best part about making these biscuits is that it’s something you can have the kids help with.  Nothing toxic about biscuit dough, not even a raw egg.  You can find recipes all over the Internet for biscuits, you can use pre-mixed biscuits or even refrigerator biscuits.  And if they don’t turn out perfectly shaped, you can always say they melted a bit in the oven!  Just be aware that you’ll usually have one that had a finger stuck into the middle of it, one that might have been flattened by an older sibling, or one that was licked before it ended up on the baking sheet.  We had some discards.

 

Remember when plating this dinner that you want a very small bowl for the soup (less mess to clean up), and you can sprinkle some of the (pasta) snowflakes on the plate.  Then just put the snowmen on and serve it up.

 

 

 

For dessert, more snowballs.  This time, I just dampened some grapes in a mixture of white corn syrup and water and rolled them in shredded coconut and put them in the freezer.  You can always substitute egg whites for my corn syrup mixture.  The neat thing about these is that they’re a combination of textures and freeze really quickly.

 

 

 

Title	Snowball Soup
Author	Mercer Mayer
Illustrator	Mercer Mayer
Publisher	Harper Trophy
Highlights /Tie in	Snowballs, Snowman, Snowflakes
Reactions to the Book	·         They really liked the story and found a lot of things with Little Critter that were just like with themselves. ·         The boys pointed out when Little Critter was nice to his Little Sister and told me that you need to be nice to little sisters.  (They don’t have any)
Meal	·         Snowball soup – Ground turkey meatballs, vegetable broth, navy beans and some stellini and pastini (to look like snowflakes) ·         Snowman biscuits ·         Frozen grape snowballs
Reactions to the Meal	·         They stuffed as many of the meatball snowballs into their mouths as they could.  The youngest one won the game. ·         It took some convincing to make them “see” the snowflakes in the pasta stars, but they let me slide on that point. ·         The snowmen were a hit.  They tried several configurations; small snow ball on the bottom, all the same size snowballs, etc.

 

Still cooking, still reading.