The New York Menu

New York is famous for many foods so we enjoyed several NY themed meals. I cooked some New York foods and we ate others at restaurants.

New York Breakfast: Bagels

Bagels are one of the most famous foods in New York. I love bagels and cream cheese for breakfast… plain bagels, blueberry (my favorite), cinnamon and raisin, they’re all delicious! We ate bagels for breakfast several times this month and even enjoyed mini bagels with our Buffalo Wing Dinner! Yes, we know that New Yorkers don’t usually eat bagels and wings, we just did that for fun. I recommend toasted bagels with strawberry cream cheese for breakfast, they are the BEST!

New York Pizza: d’Bronx

d’Bronx Pizza in Kansas City is an authentic New York Style pizzeria & delicatessen founded by native New Yorkers. I love to go to d’Bronx! We watch the pizza chefs throw the dough in the air to make a thin crust “pizza pie.” I think it’s great fun to watch the dough flip in the air. You know it is New York Style if the crust is thin and hand-tossed and the slices are large and wide so you can fold them in half. At d’Bronx, be sure to ask for “kid dough” – a little pizza dough to play with (like play dough) before you eat. My dad loves their pastrami sandwiches. I tasted his sandwich and I didn’t really like it, but Mom loves pastrami sandwiches too. The pizza, on the other hand, was GREAT! I definitely recommend d’Bronx as one of our favorite places to eat as a family – kids LOVE it!

New York Dinner: Buffalo Wings

There are many stories about the creation of Buffalo Wings. Don’t get confused by the name – of course you know buffalo do not have wings. Buffalo Wings are fried chicken wings coated in special sauce and the recipe was invented in Buffalo, New York. We made buffalo wings as a family (I mostly watched because frying buffalo wings is dangerous) and we coated them with Frank & Teresa’s Original Anchor Bar Buffalo Wing Sauce. We followed the instructions on the bottle. They were too spicy for me, but I liked the teriyaki flavored wings we also made. Mom loved them… she likes spicy foods. The rest of my family thought they were too spicy. According to the Anchor Bar website, they are THE original location of Buffalo Wings.

New York Dessert: Cheesecake

Our Raspberry Cheesecake... before we put it in the oven

My mom and sisters and I made a cheesecake together. We decorated it with hearts using raspberry drizzle. Mom made giant dots of raspberry sauce with a syringe on the cheesecake, then pulled a toothpick through the dots to make hearts. The cheesecake wasn’t just pretty…. it was delicious!

According to The Joy of Baking, “New York Cheesecakes are creamy, and smooth, and rich, and dense, and absolutely delicious. This cheesecake has three layers, starting with a graham cracker crumb crust that is topped with a cream cheese filling, and then a layer of lightly sweetened sour cream. John Mariani tells us in his The Dictionary of American Food & Drink that Americans have come to know cheesecakes made with cream cheese as ‘New York’ or ‘Jewish’ Cheesecakes, and ones made with ricotta as ‘Italian’ Cheesecakes, with both types having their roots in immigrant New York City neighborhoods.”

The New York style cheesecake was my FAVORITE New York Food of all! But, I still like bagels too!

The Connecticut Menu

Louis' Lunch

1st American Hamburger

As I was learning about Connecticut, we read the story of Louis’ Lunch, a restaurant in New Haven, built in 1895 where they claim the American Hamburger was invented. The story according to http://www.louislunch.com/history.php:  “The beginnings of the hamburger sandwich as we all know it today was really quite simple. One day in 1900, a gentleman hurriedly walked into Louis’ Lunch and told proprietor Louis Lassen he was in a rush and wanted something he could eat on the run. In an instant, Louis placed his own blend of ground steak trimmings between two slices of toast and sent the gentleman on his way. And so, the most recognizable American sandwich was born.  Today, Louis’ great grandson, Jeff Lassen, carries on the tradition. The hamburgers have changed little from their historic prototype and remain the specialty of the house. Burgers are made fresh daily; hand-rolled from a proprietary blend of five meat varieties and cooked to order in the original cast-iron grills dating back to 1898. The Lassen family hold firm on their desire not to offer any condiments. The Louis Lunch experience is about the taste and simplicity of a fresh burger grilled to perfection. Cheese, tomato, and onion are the only acceptable garnish.”

Cooking Hamburgers

So, for dinner I made hamburgers, fries, and Boston Baked Beans (from neighboring Massachusetts, as I hadn’t cooked a Massachusetts food yet). My family loved the hamburgers and said they were terrific. To make them, I mixed ground beef, one beaten egg, minced onion, and a little seasoning. Then, I rolled lumps of meat into little balls and smashed them with my hand to make patties. My dad helped me fry the hamburgers on the stove.

Dinner and a Movie

After dinner, we watched, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” starring Bing Crosby. The movie is based on the book by Mark Twain. Mark Twain grew up in Missouri, my home state, but then spent his adult life in Connecticut. The movie is a musical comedy about a man traveling back in time during the era of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and using modern inventions to impress them. Before long the king thinks he is a magician, but he is really just a modern mechanic.

The Rhode Island Menu

There are many foods famous to Rhode Island, but I really like to have “breakfast for dinner” (or lunch) so I chose to make Jonnycakes for our Rhode Island meal. Early settlers learned to grow corn from the Native Americans and found many ways to use corn to make meals, jonnycakes are still popular in Rhode Island.

According to Wikipedia, “Jonnycake (also johnnycake, johnny cake, journey cake, and johnny bread) is a cornmeal flatbread that was an early American staple food and is prepared on the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to Jamaica.  The modern jonnycake is a staple in the cuisine of New England and is often said to have originated in Rhode Island. A modern jonnycake is fried gruel made from yellow or white cornmeal that is mixed with salt and hot water or milk, and sometimes sweetened.”

With mom, I made cheesy scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, and jonnycakes for lunch.

This is the Jonnycake Recipe we followed:

Ingredients: 1/2 cup flour; 1 cup cornmeal; 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 egg, lightly beaten; 1 cup hot milk; 1 tablespoon shortening

Preparation: Mix the dry ingredients, then stir in the remaining ingredients. Drop or pour on the hot, greased griddle or drop in iron skillet and fry to golden brown on both sides. Serve with butter and syrup as for pancakes, or serve as a bread with butter.

Our Family Reviews of Jonnycakes:

• My sister Kayla, “It is very yummy and I hope we make them again!”
• My mom, “I think it was fun to try them, but I do prefer pancakes.”
• My opinion, “I thought they were okay, but they weren’t my favorite…. too corny.”

The Vermont Menu

Vermont is famous for its Maple Syrup! I was very excited for our Vermont dinner of pancakes with maple syrup, bacon, and eggs! I made the pancakes from scratch with mom. We followed our favorite recipe for buttermilk pancakes and they were delicious.

Tapping the Trees for Sap

I learned the steps for making maple syrup from reading about it and watching a video. The steps are:

1. In the winter, they drill a hole into a maple tree and put a spout into the tree. Sap (sap is kind of like blood for a tree) runs from the spout into a bucket if you do it the old-fashioned way, or the spout might hook up to a series of pipes at newer farms.
2. The full buckets of sap are poured into a tank. They boil sap carefully till the water evaporates and skim off any dirt and run it through a filter. Then you have syrup.
3. The syrup is then bottled and sold at stores.

To prepare for the dinner, we watched a video about how Maple Syrup is made and we read books about Maple Syrup:

• From Maple Trees to Maple Syrup by Kristin Thoennes Keller. This was my favorite book for kids. It explained the whole process and included pictures.
• Sugaring Season: Making Maple Syrup by Diane Burns. This book explains the step by step process for making maple syrup with great photos.
• Maple Sugar Festivals: Tapping for Sap by Lisa Gabbert. This book tells the history of maple syrup in the United States from the Native Americans tapping for sugar to modern maple sugar farms. I like the photos that helped show how they get syrup.
• Sugaring by Jessie Haas. This is the story of a family during “sugaring season.”  In the book, a girl named Nora works with her Grandpa to gather sap for syrup. Her grandma makes special maple sugaar that she loves and shares with her horses. I liked the illustrations.
• Maple Syrup Season by Ann Purmell. The pictures in this storybook are really fun. In this book the whole family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins work together during maple syrup season! At the end of the story their reward is sugar on snow, a candy they made with syrup and snow. The pictures are really great.
• Sugar on Snow by Nan Parson Rossiter. This is a story of a family during “sugar on snow” season in Vermont.
• Sugaring Time by Kathryn Lasky. This book uses photos to tell the whole story of sugaring.

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  Tapping the Trees for Sap

  
  

My entire family loved the dinner and so did I! It was really fun to have breakfast for dinner. I love maple syrup, it is very delicious!!!!

The New Hampshire Menu

Finding a New Hampshire menu was a little bit tricky, so I asked my uncle from New Hampshire and aunt with friends from New Hampshire for advice. They all suggested that the MOST popular food in New Hampshire is the Fluffernutter. Fluffernutters are very popular in all New England states.

So, we enjoyed a dinner of Fluffernutter Sandwiches, Apple Cider, and Chili (the people of New Hampshire love chili like other Americans do, and mom said we needed something healthy with dinner).

To make a Fluffernutter Sandwich:

First spread peanut butter on one slice of bread. Then spread Marshmallow Fluff on another slice of bread. Then, put the two together for a sandwich and you’re all done!

Our Family Reviews of the Fluffernutter:

My sister Kayla, “Yummy in the tummy!”

My sister Brielle… she is too little to talk, but she ate it right up!

Me, “It was so good! I love it. It tastes like dessert. I can’t believe how good it is! You have to try it.”

The Maine Menu

Emily making Clam Chowder

Tonight I fixed a dinner with foods from Maine for my family. We had:

• Clam Chowder (I used the Cliff House Clam Chowder recipe from Maine. We’ve been reading books about Maine and I learned that people in Maine often dig for clams on the beach and make clam chowder. I enjoyed making the chowder. To make the chowder, I helped measure and stir. Mom did all the chopping for me. I recommend that you try this recipe because it was so delicious to eat. The potatoes were my favorite. I didn’t really like the clams, but Daddy loved it all and he is excited to have some to take to lunch tomorrow!)
• Steamed Broccoli (Did you know that Maine ranks among the top 5 broccoli growing states in the nation? I just learned that today.)
• Salad with sliced apples (Maine is an apple-growing state), nuts, cheese, and berry vinaigrette (The salad was my favorite part of dinner. It was so good, I could hardly believe it!)
• Bread & Butter
• Wild Blueberry Tart for dessert (Every summer, I pick blueberries with my family in Missouri, but Missouri blueberries are bigger than Maine’s wild blueberries. We didn’t make the tart, we bought it at Trader Joe’s. I’m glad we had some tart leftover for tomorrow. We also read the book, “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert McCloskey. This is another great children’s book set in Maine. I am glad I have never seen a bear when we pick blueberries!)

One of Maine’s most famous foods is lobster, but Mommy can’t eat it right now because she’s expecting a new baby sister. So, Dad promised to take me on a Daddy/Daughter Date to eat lobster. I can’t wait!