Archive for November, 2010

Fun Food Saturday: Butterbeer

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

If you have a Harry Potter fan in your house (and, let’s face it, even if you don’t), you probably know that there’s a new movie out and Harry Potter fever has been at an all-time high. Lots of young fans we know would love to fly on a broomstick or do a few sneaky spells, but even if you can’t be Harry Potter, you can eat like him. Of all of the foods mentioned in the Harry Potter books, one of the most intriguing and delicious-sounding is butterbeer.

The books never give an recipe for butterbeer and the exact concoction is left to our imagination. But that’s not to say folks haven’t tried to replicate it. (Note: Although the books hint that butterbeer may be alcoholic, almost all of the recipes we’ve seen are nonalcoholic, with a kid audience in mind.) At the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando, for example, the butterbeer is one of the fastest-selling foods at the park. This top-secret recipe (which was reportedly approved by J.K.Rowling herself) is a tasty concoction that’s kind of like of a cream soda but with a little more butter and salt to cut the sugar. You can either order it cold or frozen, which is similar to a root beer float (and yes, we were there over Thanksgiving, hence the sudden interest in butterbeer).

Looking for inspiration once we got home, one of the first recipes we found for butterbeer is from the Harry Potter site known as MuggleNet, which envisions butterbeer as a warm soda with butterscotch topping and butter. However, most recipes (like the Orlando theme park) are for cold butterbeer creations. Babble’s Family Kitchen has a good recipe that looks relatively easy (you need to be willing to make your own butterscotch sauce, but you can do that ahead of time) and there are some nice step-by-step pictures to help you along the way.

We also like the approach by Darla at over at Bakingdom, who found that most of the recipes out there were either far too involved for a drink or were just glorified cream soda. She finds a nice middle ground with a whipped-cream-style concoction.

And if you’re looking for the clearest possible rundown, we like this list from Associated Content for the Top 10 Butterbeer Recipes. The recipes range from simple to complex, with a variety of different bases (cream soda, apple cider, or even ice cream). It may be too late in the season to serve frosty butterbeer floats, but a warm version could make a nice party drink for the holiday season. If that’s the case, you heard it here first: Butterbeer is the new mulled apple cider.

Fun food Saturday: Because food should be fun.

Posted Under: Just For Fun, Uncategorized | Tags: , ,
This post was written by jollytomato on November 27th, 2010

Thanksgiving for Kids

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Is there any other holiday in this country that is more centrally focused on food and family? Not that we can think of, just from glancing at the calendar. Problem is, there’s a lot of build-up. You spend all day working on the big meal, and getting ready for the relatives. By the time the appointed hour of the feast rolls around, there’s so much pressure on getting the timing of the food exactly right, and having everyone sitting down at the same time, and not having someone freaking out because some gravy accidentally touched his turkey, and… [deep breath] Can you tell we’ve been there?

This year our resolution is just to enjoy the time. If a wonderful meal happens, great. If the kids won’t go near the stuffing, we’re going to let it slide. If there’s a food disaster, that’s OK too, because we know it’ll be one of those things we laugh about for years to come.  We want it to be a special day, but we’re going to pretend in our minds that it’s just another meal, if that is what it takes to help set a more relaxed tone for the celebration.

Here are a few more things you can do to enjoy the day.  You can print out this last-minute shopping list from Parents magazine to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. You can check out these three No-Bake Thanksgiving Appetizers (Mini “Pumpkin” Cheese Balls, Smoked Salmon Pinwheels, and Creamy Pumpkin Pie Dip) from Kitchen Simplicity. You can set up a few of these Thanksgiving crafts from Disney’s Family Fun to keep the kids occupied. You can let the kids help with the leftover pie crust by making these Pie Fries from Jersey Bites. You can see if anyone is interested in helping you make these Tiny Thanksgiving Dinner cupcakes. You can just put out these food tips for grandparents without further comment. And last but not least, please remember those who are hungry, especially the children.

No Friday Food News Wrap this week; we’ll be enjoying time with our family and we hope you will too.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo credit: seemann from morguefile.com

Posted Under: Just For Fun | Tags: , , , ,
This post was written by jollytomato on November 24th, 2010

Fun Food Saturday: The Food Mill

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, which means it’s time to make some serious quantities of cranberry sauce. Oddly enough, at our house it’s the not the end result that’s so popular, it’s the means of getting there. In other words, it’s our Foley food mill, not the cranberries, that keeps ‘em coming back for more.

In case you haven’t seen a food mill, it looks just like a large saucepan, except the bottom is a giant sieve. Inside, there’s a large metal blade that turns around by way of a large handle that sticks up on top. When you turn the handle around clockwise, it mashes whatever food you’ve put in there; when you turn the handle counter-clockwise, it scrapes up the pieces that didn’t get mashed. As you turn the handle it makes a very satisfying grinding/straining noise that’s practically irresistible to little people. Soon everyone wants a turn.

You can use a food mill for baby food, tomato sauce, applesauce, and more; but at our house we use it primarily for cranberry sauce. While we love chunky cranberry sauce, it seems the little kids are more likely to eat it if it’s smooth or has the consistency of a nice jam. We just use a very standard recipe (boil one cup water with one cup sugar, add a standard 12-oz bag of cranberries, simmer for 10 minutes or until the berries pop). Then we scoop it, a half-cupful at a time, into the food mill for processing.

Since airport screenings have been in the news lately, we feel compelled to add: It is very difficult to bring a food mill on an airplane. We did it once and it wasn’t pretty. We got one from Jolly Tomato’s mom back East and we wanted to fly it out to California, but its extremely awkward shape (long handle sticking out the side, long handle coming out the top) did not lend itself to packing in a suitcase. So we put it in a shopping bag to carry on board, and it was just tall enough and wide enough to take up an annoying amount of space in the overhead compartments. Even though it doesn’t look as big as a carry-on suitcase, it effectively takes up that much room. So don’t carry one on a plane if you can avoid it. Other than that, use it as much as you can.

Fun Food Saturday: Because food should be fun.

Posted Under: Just For Fun, Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,
This post was written by jollytomato on November 20th, 2010
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