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.

 

 

Mac and Cheese by Sarah Weeks

Skill Level: Intermediate

The story this week is one of the I Can Read books from Scholastic.  This is a beginning reading level so I thought it would be a lot of fun to see just how much the eldest grandson could read.  He did a great job sounding the words and if I had to help with a word, he recognized it the next time it showed up in the book. 

 
Mac and Cheese is about two cats who are so different that you wonder how they ever became friends.  Not only friends, but the best of friends.  By the end of the story, you understand that it isn’t always necessary to be the same, if you enjoy being together, you can be friends.

 The menu was so obvious that I thought I should really try to show the moral of the story with this one.  I wanted to show how mac was good, cheese was good, but together, they were really good.  It worked.

I made up a portion of a recipe of pasta dough (1 cup flour, 1 extra large egg, some salt, about a tsp of water) and set that aside to rest.

 One of the fastest melting cheeses is Velveeta.  I needed a fast melting cheese because I was making Cheese (the cat) out of cheese, Mac (the cat) out of pasta, and then pouring a hot sauce over them to help melt it all together into a friendship.

So I took pre-sliced Velveeta since it’s much thinner than I could ever slice it and then dredged the slices in flour to keep the Cheese (the cat) from sticking together.  Just to add a bit to the flavor, I added some sweet Hungarian paprika and some smoked Spanish (hot) paprika to the flour.  Using a cat shaped cookie cutter, I cut 3 slices of Velveeta cats for each plate. This might be a good activity for your grandchildren, but knowing mine, I know I’d never have any Cheese (the cat) for any plate. They’d eat them as soon as they cut them.

 I saved the “voids” or uncut cheese parts and the dredging mixture for the sauce. 

 

Next came the salad.  I wanted to make sure the boys got a lot of protein so I topped some beautiful red leaf lettuce with some light red kidney and black beans as well as some shelled edamame.  I added some crumbles of boiled egg and topped the whole thing with a very light sprinkling of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar.

 

I wanted a crispy garnish that tied to the story, so I made some baked Parmesan crisps in the shape of cat’s heads and added chive whiskers.  Using my largest biscuit cutter (3” diameter), I filled the round shape with about 3 tablespoons of pre-shredded Parmesan. I added a bit more to shape some ears once I removed the biscuit cutter and then added my chive whiskers.  These baked in a 350 degree oven for about 5 minutes.  Keep an eye on them, though, they burn quickly.

 

 

Now that my pasta dough had rested, I rolled it out as thin as I could and using my smallest round biscuit cutter (about 1” diameter), I cut a bunch of pasta circles.  Then, holding the pasta disc in one hand, I dampened an edge, about 1/3 of the circumference of the circle with water.  I then pinched two ears on that dampened edge.  This leaves a little cup shaped depression to collect sauce, while looking somewhat like a cat (Mac).

 

While the water boiled for the pasta, I started the sauce, melting 3 tablespoons of unsalted butter, adding 3 tablespoons of the dredging mix (safe because it only touched the cheese, no meats), and stirred, creating a roux.  The paprika that was added made this a nice orange/red color.  I then added about a cup of milk and the cheese voids to let those melt.

 

 

Once the Mac (the cat) and sauce were done, I finished the plates.  I added the Mac (the cat) so the Mac (the cat) and Cheese (the cat) were clearly distinct on the plate, but then as I poured the sauce over them and had the boys stir, it all came together in a story.

 

Our dessert was our normal standby – fruit (strawberries, bananas),  nuts (pecans) and pie crust cinnamon cookies.

 

 

Title	Mac and Cheese
Author	Sarah Weeks
Illustrator	Jane Manning
Publisher	Scholastic Books
Highlights /Tie in	Cats, Title (Mac and Cheese), Not the same, but together = GREAT
Reactions to the Book	·         So Mac and Cheese are friends Grummy.  They sit together. ·         That’s like at lunch Grummy.  We sit together at lunch with our friends.  It’s better that way. ·         That’s another blue hat
Meal	·         Mac and Cheese – Pasta “Mac” and Velveeta “Cheese”, beschamel ·         Salad, multi bean and egg protein salad ·         Dessert – Strawberries, bananas and pecans with Cat piecrust cookies
Reactions to the Meal	·         The boys loved watching me pour the sauce over their cats, then they had to mix them ·         SCHEEEEZE ·         The dressing on the salad wasn’t that big a hit (soy sauce and rice wine vinegar), but the beans were. ·         We need a book called Tuna Salad, Grummy.

 

It feels good to cook the books!

This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen

Cooking Skill Level: EASY

Once again we have a book by one of my very favorite authors, Jon Klassen.  He’s so good at what he does.  Again, the story features a hat.  One that doesn’t belong to the fish that’s wearing it. 

The menu for this was just so obvious to me.  Hats, two sizes of fish, crab on a log, underwater plants to hide in and maybe a bit of seascaping (shells).

This is how I built the story:

First, I worked on the underwater plants.  I love to give the boys different lettuces since they grew some the summer before last and they remember that it comes in all shapes and colors.  The little “Artisan” lettuces that you can find these days are so wonderful for landscaping/seascaping a story.  I dressed this with a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar and oil.

 

 Then I added the logs; celery and cream cheese.  I needed the cream cheese to keep the crab’s claws in place.  The claws were made of mostly stripped thyme twigs.  I saved the stripped leaves for later.  For the body of the crab, I cut a cherry tomato in half and stuck it onto the cream cheese between the claws.  Make sure you play with the claws, you can turn them to face the hiding place (lettuce), or have them waving at the kids, or even covering the crab’s face. 

 

Next I placed my two fish on the plate.  The big fish was simply a fish stick.  The little fish was just a piece of a fish stick.  Of course I had to put a hat on the little fish.

 

Orecchiete again for the hats, this time blue.  I found some organic all natural food coloring on the Internet, but decided I’d use what I had for cake decorating.  At first, I used way too much.  Obviously…

 

 So I tamed that a bit and added in some pasta shells so I could use them in seascaping the plate. 

I added some mozzarella perlini, tiny little pearls of cheese, to the shells to look like all the bubbles you see throughout the story.

 

Dessert was some blackberries (which could look like hats if you squint hard enough) and whipped cream.

 

When we sat down for dinner, I got a high five from the oldest.  He was very proud of how Grummy is learning to cook for boys.  They were all impressed that their tongues and fingers turned blue, but it didn’t stop them from eating and talking about the story.  The middle one wasn’t sure whether he liked this story or I Want My Hat Back better.  He definitely likes fish stories, but we didn’t get carrots with this one Grummy.  Fish don’t like carrots like rabbits do.

Making conversation was sometimes a challenge when we started these dinners.  The boys’ attention was often scattered.  With time, they have become experts at discussing books, themes, food, and ideas.  Plus, I know they will always remember these times and hopefully do the same with their own children and grands.

 

Title	This Is Not My Hat
Author	Jon Klassen
Illustrator	Jon Klassen
Publisher	Candlewick Press
Highlights /Tie in	Blue Hat, Fish (one big, one small)
Reactions to the Book	·         The oldest caught on immediately that this was a book by someone we “knew” – “A HAT? Grummy, ANOTHER HAT” ·         Swim practice on the couch – no winners in the race, they pretty much stayed in one place just waving limbs around
Meal	·         Hats: Orecchiete (blue) ·         Fish sticks ·         Shell pasta ·         Salad that looks like water plants (good for hiding)(sort of) ·         Crab on a log
Reactions to the Meal	·         Pasta hats on each finger, old news (old hat?) ·         The big fish stick chased the little one into the salad.  The littlest grandson chewed on the stick of thyme for a while, then gave it to me.  Sharing is nice. ·         A lot of time spent on putting the perlini “bubbles” into the shells

Where's You Book Grummy?

 

 

I made a really quick stop to drop off some things at my daughter's the other day.  The two younger children were home, while the eldest was in school.  The middle child saw me, saw that my hands were empty and said "Where's you book, Grummy?" and the youngest said "Where's the food?".  I tried to explain to them that it wasn't a book and dinner night, but they were not about to accept that.  The youngest went up to his room and brought me a huge armload of books (as huge as you can get for a 2 year old).  The three year old sat on the couch in "listening position", ready to hear whatever story we were going to read. 

Isn't that a great greeting?  It really doesn't get much better than that.  They associate the books and dinners with Grummy.  They're disappointed when it isn't time for a book and dinner.  And they know what goes into a book and dinner. 

When the kindergartner came home, he joined us on the couch after looking for the Grummy basket (which wasn't there  - see picture above - this usually has food containers and a book in it).

It ended up that all of the boys "read" stories to me.  They turned the pages on books they'd heard forever, and told the story to me.  We talked about the stories, we talked about what kind of food we'd have to make someday for those stories and we acted out some of the characters. 

I have the best grandchildren. 

Tips and Tricks - Chapter 3

As promised, Body Parts.

 

The top two allies in edible Body Parts are flour-based.  Pasta and bread dough.  They can be shaped, trimmed, stretched and stacked to take on just about any shape.  You can create them from scratch, buy them semi-prepared or even totally prepared.  Even better, they’re fun to play with.  I’ve had more fun with the boys by giving them their little plastic knives and a bunch of cookie cutters, rolling out some dough, and telling them to build a snowman, build a house, build a monster.  I’ve found that if you do this, you’ll get all sorts of stories from them about how such and such monster has more legs, because he likes sneakers, or the head on this one is HUMONGOUS because he tried not to sneeze and pinched his nose … I love these stories.  They make everyone laugh and amazingly, they listen to each other.  What a great skill they’re learning. 

I’ve already given my pasta recipe a few times but since I really dislike scrolling and clicking, I’m going to give it again for your convenience.  Also, here’s a very simple dough recipe for pizza dough which is probably the easiest “bread” dough to make.  It mixes well and holds up to a lot of molding and shaping. 

Remember that this might also be a good opportunity to add value to the dough, check out www.KingArthurFlour.com or www.Allrecipes.com for recipes for whole wheat and grain breads. 

Another source for doughs is the freezer section at your grocery store.  Frozen pizza dough, frozen bread dough (whole wheat or white), frozen rolls.  Frozen rolls have the added bonus of allowing you to thaw and use just a small amount, but make sure that the dough has not been baked at all prior to freezing.  If it already looks like a roll, it's probably been cooked at least a bit.

 

A final tip about bread dough creations: Make sure the kids wash their hands before they start.  You really do want the creations to be edible.

 

Pasta:

2 to 2 ¼ cups all purpose flour 3 eggs 1 tsp salt

Blend all ingredients and knead until flour is incorporated and dough is elastic.  Put in plastic bag and let rest on counter top for about ½ hour.  Dust your counter top liberally with flour and using a rolling pin, roll out the dough.  Flip the dough and flour it so it doesn’t stick, and continue rolling (turning/flipping as needed) until the dough is as thin as you can get it (it plumps when cooked, so you want it thin).  I try to get it thin enough to see my hand through it.    Use cookies cutters, knives, pizza cutter, etc. to achieve desired shapes.  In a large pan, bring a couple of quarts of water to a boil.  Salt the water. Stir the water and drop in the pasta shapes, continuing stirring for about a minute so the shapes don’t stick together.   Cook for 4-6 minutes, testing for doneness.  Drain and serve.

Just a note about this recipe … I use a flour blend, Italian Blend from King Arthur Flour Company, but All Purpose flour works as well.  I also often add dried herbs to the flour before mixing and kneading.  I’ve even been known to add spices like nutmeg or cinnamon to the water when boiling the pasta.  It doesn’t add too much flavor, rather just a hint.

 

Pizza Dough:

2 ¼  Tsp (1 envelope) active dry yeast 1 1/3 cups warm water   Combine in a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a  heavy duty mixer, and let stand until yeast dissolves (approx 5 min). Add: 3 ½ to 3 ¾ cups all purpose flour 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp salt

Mix by hand, or on low speed for about 1 minute to blend all ingredients.  Knead for about 10 minutes (by hand or with dough hook on mixer).  Turn dough out into a lightly greased bowl and cover.  Let rise about 1 to 1 ½ hours.   Then you can begin playing with and shaping the dough.   Bake at 425 until golden brown.

TIP:  If you have shapes that vary wildly in sizes, just keep an eye on them in the oven, and maybe even bake at a lower temperature so that the tiny pieces don’t burn.

 

I’m planning to take pictures or body parts, but there are some supplies I’ll need to get.  That means that this Chapter is to be continued…..

Supplies:

Carrots                      Olives                             Elbow Noodles
Celery                        Blueberries                   Lasagna Noodles
Potato                       Radish                            Block of cheese
Apple                        Hazelnuts                       Sliced Almonds (skin on if possible)
Cucumber                Cauliflower                    Mushrooms
Kiwi                           Rice                                 Ricotta or cream cheese
Cold Cuts

Until next time ...