We’re less than two weeks away to Lucie’s fourth birthday. I’m planning birthday treats at preschool and at our mom’s club playgroup. I have an egg-free mix, Cherrybrook Kitchen Chocolate Cake Mix, to make cupcakes and lots of purple frosting leftover from Nathan’s birthday party last week. My homemade icing – basically Spectrum Shortening (it’s organic and transfat free), artificial flavoring, water and powdered sugar – stays good for a month in the frig.

If it’s o.k. with the teachers, I’ll be giving out some goodie bags too. I have lots of rubber ducks, bookmarks, and little book giveaways left over from my Usborne Books business. (I’ve shut it down this year to concentrate on my writing.) This way the kids will have cool stuff to play with and no sweets to freak out the parents.

Next year when she’s a bit bigger, I may do a party at home in addition to one at school. I found a terrific book to help out with party theme ideas and activities – Come to Tea: Fun Tea Party Themes, Recipes, Crafts, Games, Etiquette and More. Themes include a classic tea party as well as princess, Mad Hatter, teddy bear, moms and daughters, garden tea, liberty tea, and a pajama breakfast tea party. There are recipes for all types of cookies, teas, and treats and great ideas for decorating and activities.

I liked this food idea for the teddy bear party. It’s easily changed to several types of parties as long as you have the appropriately shaped cookie cutter.

Beary Good Sandwiches
Makes 2 sandwiches

Ingredients:

1. Four pieces of white bread

Fillings (your choice):

1. 2 Tbs of peanut butter mixed with 2 Tbs of honey (Lucie would use cream cheese or butter and honey since she can’t eat peanut butter)
2. Cheese slices
3. Sandwich meats
4. Mustard and/or ketchup

(A favorite combo of Lucie’s is bologna and ketchup. She’s a white trash kinda kid, dontcha know?)

Directions:

1. Make sandwiches out of white bread and cut out bear shapes with a large cookie cutter.
2. Fill on sandwich with honey spread and the other with cheese and meat. Use condiments to decorate faces on the meat sandwich if you like.

(Sandwich picture courtesy of Moriza’s Photos on Flickr.)

Last week’s post about If You Give a Pig a Pancake got me thinking about all the If You Give books and the Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury, which I just received in the mail from one of the monthly children’s book clubs.

Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury is a great book to dance, sing, read, bake, and do art with! Not only does it combine several of Laurq Numberoff’s books, it also comes with a CD of songs, and has recipes and craft activities for kids. I was thrilled to see that the story, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, not only has instructions for making sock puppets, but comes with an eggless muffin recipe as well.

Chocolate Mud Muffins
12 muffins

1. 2 cups flour
2. 1 1/4 cup sugar
3. 1/3 cup cocoa
4. 1 tsp cinnamon
5. 1 1/4 tsp baking soda
6. 1/2 tsp salt
7. 1 1/4 cup buttermilk
8. 1/4 cup vegetable oil
9. 2 tsp vanilla

Moose Treats – Choose 1 or more of these to total one cup:

• chocolate chips
• chocolate-covered peanuts
• chocolate-covered peanut butter pieces

Instructions:

1. Turn on oven to 400 degrees F. Make sure rack is in center of oven. Generously spray or grease muffin cups and the top of a tin.
2. In a large bowl, with a fork or whisk, combine the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. In a medium bowl, mix buttermilk, oil, and vanilla. Add the wet mixture to teh dry mxture, then stir just until combined. in 2 or 3 strokes stir in moose treats. (Optional: hold back about 1/4 cup of moose treats to sprinkle on top.)
3. Divide the “mud” equally among muffin cups, then sprinkle the remaining treats on top, if you wish. (You can taste the batter – no eggs!) Bake about 25-30 minutes or until the tops are very well cooked.

Thinking about the Year of the Boar I noticed how pig positive Americans are (and not because we like bacon either). If you look at children’s literature, we love pigs, just look at Charlotte’s Web.

Here are a few more examples:

• The Truffle Hunter – Another Kane/Miller international title, this time from France. Not only is it a porcine love story between Martine and Raoul, it’s about following your passions in life. For ages 4 to 8.
• Meet Wild Boars – This cautionary tale will show you that there’s no such thing as a nice wild boar. For ages 4 to 8.
• Oink? While the other farmyard animals try to show pigs Thomas and Joseph how to get things done, they can’t seem to do anything right. Maybe being lazy isn’t as dumb as it seems. For ages 4 to 8.
• If You Give a Pig a Pancake - One little girl tries to keep up with the demands of a busy little pig. If anything, the book explores cause and effect, though I know some parents have been dismayed at the big’s bossiness. For ages 4 to 8.
• The Mercy Watson books – To Mr. & Mrs. Watson, Mercy is not just a pig–she’s a porcine wonder. And to Mercy, the Watsons are an excellent source of buttered toast. Let’s join Mercy as she Goes for a Ride, Fights Crime, comes to the Rescue, and acts like a Princess in Disguise. Great chapter books for first through third graders.

Do you have any favorite pig books?

Since President’s Day has become more of a shopping and day off school and work holiday, maybe it’s time to get back to basics and teach our children about the presidents and U.S. history. One way to do this is with Do-Re-Me & You’s America the Musical book. This book is a Dr. Toy best A/V Product and Children’s Products winner. It’s also a 2006 Teacher’s Choice Award winner.

On a musical journey through time, your budding historian will read about the cultures, politics, and lifestyles of the people who inspired the famous lyrics. Penned in kid-friendly language and riddled with oddly-interesting facts (one President had hippo bones and cow’s teeth in his mouth), it’s an unforgettable musical lesson in history when the CD brings each era to life with vivid characters, engaging and humorous dialogue, and the songs themselves.

Each chapter has a section called “Amazing Presidents” and highlights outstanding people, events, and “Music of the Times.” The CD contains classics like “Erie Canal,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “This Land is Your Land” that both you and your children will enjoy.

And believe it or not, there are presidential recipes as documented at the Red Tape Blog, a blog about items of interest to the government documents librarians of Michigan State University. There’s some great links, including one to George Washington’s Mount Vernon kitchen. I love old recipes because they’re so wild. Imagine making a Great Cake with 40 eggs and 4 pounds of butter!

Here’s an old presidential recipe that I liked and that you could actually make at home.

Abigail Adams Apple Pan Dowdy
Serving Size : 4

Ingredients – Pastry :

1. 1 1/2 cups flour
2. 1/2 cup shortening

Ingredients – Filling:

1. 1/2 cup sugar
2. 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3. 1/4 teaspoon salt
4. 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
5. 10 large apples
6. 1/2 cup molasses
7. 3 tablespoons butter — melted
8. 1/4 cup water

Directions – Pastry:

1. Blend until mealy. Sprinkle a little ice water over dough, enough to hold together.
2. Roll out to 1/4″ thickness, brush with 1/4 cup melted butter. Cut pastry in half. Place halves on top of each other. Roll and cut again.
3. Repeat until 16 times (16 pieces of dough piled up on top of each other) then chill for 1 hour.
4. Roll pastry again and cut in half. Line bottom of baking dish. Save other half for top.

Directions – Filling:

1. Peel and slice the apples. Mix with sugar and spices and put in pastry lined dish. Combine molasses with butter and water. Pour over apples.
2. Cover with top crust and seal. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. Then reduce heat to 325 degrees.
3. “Dowdy” the dish by cutting the crust into apples with sharp knife. Bake one hour. Serve hot with ice cream or whipped cream.

(Picture courtesy of Martha Stewart who has her own recipe for Apple-Raisin Pandowdy.)

Chinese New Year is considered a major holiday for the Chinese and has had a strong influence on the new year celebrations of its neighbors. These include Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongolians, the Nepalese, and the Bhutanese. What better way to teach your children about the holiday than through books, crafts, and food?

Books

• Kane/Miller’s New Clothes for New Year’s Day by Hyun-joo Bae for ages 4 to 8
• Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year Lift-the-Flap Book by Joan Holub for ages 4 to 8
• In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord for ages 9 to 12

Crafts/Activities

• Kaboose’s Chinese New Year crafts
• Enchanted Learning Crafts and Activities for Chinese New Year
• PBSKids – Sagwa’s Countdown to the New Year online game

More Information

• Chinese New Year Resources from KiddyHouse.com
• Chinese New Year for Children – Cooking with Kids from the Food Network
• Chinese New Year: 2007 from Allrecipes.com

Food

Pork Dumplings 
Yields: 6 servings

Ingredients:

1. 100 (3.5 inch square) wonton wrappers
2. 1 3/4 pounds ground pork
3. 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root
4. 4 cloves garlic, minced
5. 2 tablespoons thinly sliced green onion
6. 4 tablespoons soy sauce
7. 3 tablespoons sesame oil
8. 1 egg, beaten
9. 5 cups finely shredded Chinese cabbage

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, combine the pork, ginger, garlic, green onion, soy sauce, sesame oil, egg and cabbage. Stir until well mixed.
2. Place 1 heaping teaspoon of pork filling onto each wonton skin. Moisten edges with water and fold edges over to form a triangle shape. Roll edges slightly to seal in filling. Set dumplings aside on a lightly floured surface until ready to cook.
3. To Cook: Steam dumplings in a covered bamboo or metal steamer for about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Ladies and gentlemen, shake your Planter’s peanuts can ’cause Scaredy Squirrel has won the Cybils award for Best Fiction Picture Book!

Yours truly was a judge, or should I say Lucie and Nathan were and I was just their proxy. Since our category was picture books, I really relied on their reactions to the various stories. They must have been good judges, because they agreed with us adults. As Anne, organizer of the Cybils, writes:

Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt (Kid’s Can Press) – This eponymous squirrel hits little kids and big alike right where they live: in the numbing comfort of routine and abject fear of The Unknown. This is a tiny book with a big lesson about bravery. Watt makes the most of each page, using repetition and exaggeration to hilariously dissect Scaredy Squirrel’s paranoia, from the minutiae of his daily habits to a tour of his emergency kit. When the unexpected finally occurs, the joke’s on all of us. Field-tested in libraries and living rooms and at bedsides by the judges, Scaredy Squirrel elicited the most giggles per page and requests for re-reads among a variety of age groups, including parents.

To learn more about the book or author Melanie Watt, visit the Scaredy Squirrel website.

So what kind of nut recipe would appeal to Scaredy Squirrel? Maybe a pecan roll. It would be the kind of high energy nut snack that would keep well, thus a good addition to his emergency kit. Personally, I loved these treats as a kid. We’d always get them in the Carolinas on car trips south from New Jersey to the Florida Keys. This recipe comes from HowStuffWorks.com and judging by the photo, it’s the real deal.

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Our next pick from Kane/Miller is Guji Guji by Guji Guji by Chih Y. Chen of Taiwan. Raised from an egg by Mother Duck, Guji Guji is content with his life as a “crocoduck.” Then one day, he meets up with three big, bad dudes who try to convince him that he is, like them, a duck eating crocodile! What should Guji Guji do? You and the kids will cheer as Guji Guji saves the day and his duck family.

For ages 5 to 9, Guji Guji is a terrific book for unconventional families – single families, gay families, step families, families with adopted or foster children, and families of mixed race or ethnicity. It shows that family is made up of folks who love and care about each other. You don’t have to look like each other or act the same way to be a family. Plus, it’s just a lot of fun to say “Guji Guji” out loud.

And while it was really tempting to give you a recipe for alligator bites or a little gator gumbo, I settled on Alligator Pie.

Alligator Pie
Serves 8

Ingredients:

1. 1 unbaked graham cracker pie crust
2. 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
3. 8 ounces sour cream
4. 8 ounces Cool Whip
5. 2 drops of green food coloring

Directions:

1. Mix cream cheese and sour cream well. Add 2 drops of green food coloring. Fold in Cool Whip.
2. Pour into pie crust.
3. Refrigerate for 2 hrs. or overnight.
4. Extra Cool Whip can be added on top and cherries added on top.

(Green tea pie picture courtesy of Nibble & Scribble.)

Alligator pie, alligator pie,
If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna die.
Give away the green grass, give away the sky,
But don’t give away my alligator pie.

Alligator stew, alligator stew,
If I don’t get some I don’t know what I’ll do.
Give away my furry hat, give away my shoe,
But don’t give away my alligator stew.

Alligator soup, alligator soup,
If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna droop.
Give away my hockey stick, give away my hoop,
But don’t give away my alligator soup.

(Dennis Lee – 1974 Alligator Pie)