Ferdinand the Bull’s Spanish Feast

A couple of weeks ago, our family was inspired to put together a special dinner after reading a couple of blog posts titled Around the World ~ One Picture Book at a Time and How to Study Your Favorite Country.

To start out, we checked out Ferdinand the Bull from our library and read it for a couple nights. Then we found some Spanish recipes online. Since I’m a picky eater, I was a little bit limited, but finally found a recipe for Viva Madrid Spanish Chicken. Rosemary really wanted to do Gazpacho, which we had learned was cold tomato soup. She LOVES tomato soup and I think she just assumed to make Gazpacho all we had to do was open up a can of Campbell’s, pour it in a bowl and we’d be done. We didn’t do Gazpacho. Instead, we added some Spanish rice, green beans (not sure about how culturally correct those were, but it was what we had), and then had flan for dessert.

Our meal. The chicken really turned out great…but I did leave the onions out. :-)

There’s a line in the book that says “and all the lovely ladies wore flowers in their hair.” Rosemary and I were going to each wear flowers, but when we went to cut the hibiscus, we only had one on our bush. So we pinned that in Rosemary’s and added a couple of silk flowers we had around. Rosemary also insisted on wearing a dress to dinner that night. Rosemary really wanted Jonathan to dress as a matador and Ben to dress as Ferdinand, but alas, we weren’t able to get the appropriate costumes together for them. :-)

Rosemary opened the book to her favorite page with the lovely ladies.

Ben thoroughly enjoyed his flan.

The flan was store bought…and so good.

Our family had such a good time doing this that we’re going to try it again, we’ve just got to decide ‘where’ we want to go next.