Our French Feast

Last month we 'traveled' to Spain - this month, it was France. We picked up Anatole, Madeline, and a children's book about Paris to learn a bit about France. One time, Rick Steves was on and Rosemary saw him when he was talking about the Arch de Triumph. She headed over to our stack of books, found the Paris one and paged through until she found the picture. It's pretty amazing to watch when things connect in her mind.

We also got a copy of the quintessential French cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, to find our meal. Trouble was, just about every main dish in the cookbook was swimming in some kind of wine. I know that most of it cooks off, but the thought of feeding it to Rosemary and Ben just seemed wrong. As it worked out though, one of our nieces had just done a week long French cooking camp and was able to recommend a main dish - Lemon (or lime) butter chicken - and suggested asparagus as our vegetable. We added some herb rice and hollandaise sauce and were set. She also assured me that crepes were 'very easy' to make so we decided on doing crepes for dessert.

Rosemary helped make the lime butter for our chicken. And I cheated with the hollandaise sauce...the whole raw egg and hot butter thing just seemed really difficult. So we used the mix.

Some red, white, and blue at the table for our meal

We ended up using just one Julia Child recipe...the one for dessert crepes...which still called for rum. I just substituted with a bit of vanilla.

To attempt to get in the mood for our meal, Rosemary tried on the beret before dinner.

I thought Ben looked pretty cute in the beret.

While Jonathan bathed the kids, I made the crepes. French chefs need not fear, I'm pretty much inept at making crepes. But once they were topped with leftover ice cream and toppings from Jonathan's graduation party, everyone thought they were great.

Now our next stop will be China. And for that, we'll be doing takeout.