Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo, Day 1

Recipe #1: Beaver Dens

[Insert off-color humor here.]

This recipe we uncovered in the kiddo's latest issue of Your Big Backyard, and it just seemed too easy to pass up: Melt some chocolate, peanut butter and butterscotch, throw in some chow mein noodles, spoon onto wax paper, let cool. Plus I'm a sucker for no-bake cookies, although I must admit I've never eaten chow mein noddles in my life. I remember quite well the La Choy commercials that aired during Mum's CBS soaps, and I remember being absolutely fascinated by La Choy's meal-in-two-cans sets, but today was my first day to eat chow mein noodles. (Obviously, childhood poverty didn't deprive me of anything on this account.)

The kiddo was quite enthralled by my makeshift double boiler (which I used even though the recipe called to just nuke the chocolate and butterscotch chips and then add the PB and return for another quick round of nuking), and he was also fascinated by my portable food scale, which we used to measure out double the amount of chocolate (well, carob) chips and butterscotch chips. Yes, we doubled the recipe not because we need yet another batch of no-bake chocolate cookies in the deep freeze but because the original recipe calls for one-eighth cup of PB, and I was too lazy to calculate how to measure that amount when I don't have a one-eighth cup measuring cup (my lovely Williams-Sonoma set didn't come with one, thank you very much).

Did I end up substituting anything? Does a bear defecate in the forest? Is the Pope Catholic?

(That last one I assume is an affirmative. Now I recognize that not all bears live in forests, ergo not all bears defecate in a forest, so a resounding "Yes!" to that rhetorical question isn't a given. But perhaps the question of whether or not I substituted something should be considered a rhetorical one right up there with a bear's excretory functions and the Pope's religious persuasions.)

I stocked up on PB--creamy and crunchy--when it was on sale last week at Target. Being the idiot that I am, I failed to reserve from the deep freezer a jar of creamy. So all I had at the ready was crunchy, and the kiddo didn't reject the notion of using crunchy. What I found odd was that I didn't detect any peanuts in the melty mess before adding the noodles or while spooning out the cookies. Does this mean ConAgra doesn't use real peanuts in its Reduced-Fat Crunchy Peter Pan? I don't think real peanut morsels would dissolve, but I'm not a peanut farmer. (Does anyone have Jimmy Carter's cell number?*)

The kiddo was very helpful during the entire process, and he's quite thoughtful. Here's a sample of our conversation during the making of this recipe:

Kiddo: "I thought peanut butter, chocolate and butterscotch all mixed up together would taste like chocolate."
Me: "What do you think it tastes like?"
Kiddo: "Yummy!"

He's got a way with words, that son 'o mine.

By the way, be really careful using carob chips in lieu of regular 'ol chocolate chips. I haven't done any research yet on this matter, but my experience so far with them tells me they melt in the presence of the slightest bit of body heat. I swear, my kiddo picked up his first beaver den to enjoy (for his after-nap treat), and the darn thing started melting on contact--and he was still standing in the open refrigerator!

Recipe #2: You'll-Go-Ape for Chocolate-Covered Bananas
Last week I nabbed a copy of Emeril's There's a Chef in My Soup! by that kingpin of cuisine branding, Emeril Lagasse. (Nothing egotistical at all about putting your name in the title of the book in addition to having your mug on every page, your name embroidered twice on the chef's coat you wear on the cover image and your name, of course, as the author appearing at the bottom of the cover image.) Sorry, mon ami Emeril, but I picked up your kiddie culinary tome on the discount cart at Half-Price Books for three bucks.

I picked the book up on a whim, hoping that perhaps I could interest the boy in cooking with his mom while he was home from daycare. Naturally, he showed no interest in the book when I first presented it to him, but he was all over it suddenly when Mommy and Daddy were browsing through it and pointing out yummy-looking recipes the following morning. The chocolate-covered bananas looked easy enough for me to only minorly screw up, and it promised to have leftover chocolate for the boy to lick up. Can't ask much more from a "kid-friendly" recipe, can ya?

After the fun of melting carob chips, butterscotch chips and peanut butter together in a double boiler earlier in the morning, the kiddo wasn't all that impressed with melting some leftover microwavable dipping chocolate (from Krishan knows how long ago). He spent a good deal of the prep time playing with his beat-to-hell firetruck in the yoga room (he, Mommy and Daddy were rescuing people from fires, slipping over slippery ice, taking the wrong turns--probably because Daddy was driving, I suspect--and having other adventures in said firetruck), but once I declared 'twas time to coat the bananas and sprinkle them with our sprinkle-ables: leftover chopped nuts (from back when we used to eat Breyer's Fried Ice Cream smothered with fat-free Smucker's chocolate topping and chopped nuts to emulate Pappasito's dearly departed fried-giant-ice-cream-in-a-shell, or sin on a plate with whipped cream and strawberries), leftover chocolate animal cookie crumbs (from the Snickers ice cream cake I made right before that job interview) and, of course, various sprinkles and colored sugars from CakeMate. Being the rainbow nut that the kiddo is, he decided after assuring me he'd want a banana with nuts and one with the cookie crumbs that he only wanted the rainbow sprinkles. Little bugger....

By the way, Emeril calls to melt regular chocolate chips and then pour in some heavy cream to make the dipping chocolate. Not for me, Emeril. Sorry, Bam-meister, but you take your heavy cream somewhere else.

And while we had instantaneous melting issues with the carob chips and the beaver dens, we had instantaneous freezing issues with the bananas and the dipping chocolate. Those bananas were indeed frozen solid after a few hours in the deep freezer, and I had no idea the coating chocolate would freeze practically on contact. That made getting the sprinkles to stick damn hard, which didn't go over too well with the boy.

Instead of following Emeril's directions to place the coated and sprinkled bananas on wax paper to cool, I grabbed a piece of foam from my new tower fan, covered it with a bit of wax paper left over from the beaver dens and plugged each sticked banana into it after the kiddo wrapped up his work, then popped that foam in the freezer until it was chow time. You don't have to be impressed with my ingenuity, but you can be if you want.

Recipe #3: Super Stuffed Shells
Another recipe from Emeril's kiddy book, but made over by the Misadventurous Faudie (and Kid). It's intended to be your basic Americanized Italian pasta dish with a tomato-based pasta sauce on top, but since my kid hasn't been exposed to much Americanized European food, I was leery of how he might take to this dish as intended. So I sold it as a giant shells-and-cheese spin on one of his favorite mac and cheese varieties.

Did I follow any of the recipe? Well, I did follow Emeril's suggestions for how to prepare the shells. And I did use ricotta cheese (fat-free, of course) and some shredded mozzarella (fat-free, of course). I also used some of the spices he calls for: dried basil, dried oregano (from the container we bought at Sam's when I first got my own Sam's card, which happened when we were living in Santa Fe, in the fall of 1995) and some ground black pepper. I did use a little bit of olive oil to saute some onions, just as the Bam-meister suggests.

But that's about it. For the cheese of our giant shells-and-cheese dish, I combined the ricotta with some mozzarella, fat-free sour cream (probably about two tablespoons, maybe three) and some skim milk (again, probably two to three tablespoons' worth) with the sauted onions and kept that warm while I waited for the kiddo and Daddy to wrap up the shells. While I had the boys scramble to get their tuna ready (that was our main protein for the night), I stuffed the shells. Sure, the final dish was more Americanized Italian than mac-and-cheese-on-steroids, but, hey, I was improvising.

The kiddo declared that he liked the stuffed shells, so I felt like this one was a victory. Of course, he didn't eat all the cheese stuffing, but that's probably for the better since the poor kid carries the constipation gene. (We know that when he disappears for 20 minutes or more and isn't making any noise, he's in the bathroom trying to take care of things. We've tried so many different natural ways to help things move along in his colon, but none of them seem to help.) He polished off (to my surprise, for I was damn sure he would reject them) a chocolate-dipped banana for dessert then helped Daddy clear the table and clean up before trotting off to play more trains in the Star Wars room/study.

And that was Day One. Not too bad, all in all. The kiddo seemed to enjoy our culinary misadventures. I was thrilled (most of the time) that he was so keen on washing things--in the sink, no less, not with his tongue or fingers--but at the same time kind of disturbed. Then again, when you go to visit Nana and Papa and see one of them handwashing because they live in this magic pocket of the time-space continuum that dishwashers passed over, handwashing probably seems like a treat. Having grown up in that bubble of the time-space continuum that dishwashers passed over, handwashing isn't that fun. There's nothing like dishpan hands at the age of 8!

*If you want more evidence of what a freak I am, check out the link embedded here. Scroll down to the image of Jimmy in his Navy uniform. Not too harsh on the eyes back in the day. Guess he went on to spend a little too much time in the sun without sunscreen tending his peanuts.)