Had an early Halloween party

My little M&M

My first Halloween party table! Details on my food blog.

Costume change to the dark side:)

Canada Day celebrations at Ron McLean Park

This year we considered going to Stevenston for their annual salmon festival. I heard their barbecue salmon was delicious but what we really wanted to do was to have Tristan take part in the children's bike parade. We just couldn't decide so we ended up not going. It would have been nice to dress Tristan up and decorate his bike but we couldn't do it at the last minute. Plus, we had to be there at 8:30AM, which is super early for us! Maybe we'll be more prepared next year.

We also considered Granville Island and Burnaby Village Museum. There were so many things happening everywhere for Canada Day. In the end, we just wanted to stay close to home and the closest festival to us was actually at Ron McLean Park. It was a 8-10 minute walk from our home and it was probably as good as anywhere else. The other nice thing about this park was that the celebration didn't start until 11AM. I got to sleep in until almost 9AM! Woohoo!

It's pretty crazy. We have been living in this neighborhood for years and we have never been to the Ron McLean Park Canada Day celebration. We ended up spending a couple hours at the park. There were lots of games for kids. I tried to get Tristan to swing the hockey stick at the goalie but he wasn't interested. He wasn't interested in any throwing game either. We sat and watched some entertainment on the stage. They had folk dancers, music, and people came out doing tai chi. There lots of food stands as well. All the food was a bargain and everything was for fundraising. I bought a smokie and pop for $3 and Tristan and I shared the smokie for lunch. Jean-Louis drank the pop. I also noticed watermelon slices were $0.25 each but Tristan didn't want any.

There was a playground and Tristan was more interested in that than the other activities. He saw one of his daycare friends there and was sort of following her around. He was too shy to say hello since she was playing with a group of other kids. We noticed so many kids were dressed in red and white for Canada Day!

There was a fire truck and Tristan got to look inside. There was a police car and all the kids were taking turns sitting inside. Some pretended to be criminals and sat in the back seat. Every now and then the police siren would go on. Lol. What can you expect when you let little curious kids sit inside a police car?

We lined up for the bouncy castle but Tristan was scared when he was inside. He tried to climb up but had trouble and we told him he didn't have to leave yet. Anyway, he cried a bit so we just removed him. We ended up lining up for the pirate ship bouncy castle. It was an open ship so he wasn't as scared. He could also see us too. After bouncing around, he wanted to go again but we ran out of time. It's funny because last year we went in a bouncy castle just like the enclosed one at this park and he wasn't scared at all.

We got home nice and early and started our little barbecue. Just the three of us. Hot dogs, veggie dogs, grilled bananas/mangoes, tomato salad, chips, and lemon/fruit tarts for dessert. By 6:30PM we were done eating and done cleaning up. That's an entire hour earlier than what we are used to! Hooray for celebrating Canada Day near home! :)

Hope all my Canadian readers had a fabulous Canada Day too!

 

Easter crafts, Easter hunt, Easter day feast

This Easter was the most fun! In previous years, Tristan wasn't really interested in many crafts and he was too young to play in Easter hunts. He is almost 3 1/2 now and he is quite ready for all of that now.

EASTER CRAFTS

We painted boiled eggs. Not only Tristan and I but Jean-Louis as well! Jean-Louis really got into it. He carefully painted a couple of pretty rainbow eggs :) Now that is what I call family Easter fun!

Tristan wanted a tiger so I painted Tigger.

Oh yeah, I also baked sugar cookies and cupcakes :) What kind of foodie would I be if I didn't?

1st EASTER HUNT

On Saturday night, I planned a egg hunt for Tristan. I took the idea from the Easter hunt article I found, which suggested to insert clues inside eggs that would eventually lead to finding the Easter basket. I bought 8 plastic eggs from the dollar store and wrote 8 clues about where to find the next egg. The important thing is that all the eggs have to be located in the exact order! As I unfortunately found out last night, you can't just randomly hide the eggs. Lol.

I set aside the first clue and inserted the last 7 clues into 7 eggs. The first clue was given at the start of the game. The 8th and final egg said "good job!" and gave a clue of where to find the prize. It helps to write down all the clues and then number them in the order they should be found. Then I crossed my fingers, went to bed, and hoped everything would work out as planned :)

There are three floors to our home and I made sure clues were distributed everywhere. I planned it so that Tristan would have to go up and down the stairs many times. He had to work for his prize, yo!

Here are examples of some of the clues I used:

• This is your favorite toy. You love playing this with daddy. Look around here for the next egg.
• You sleep with this at night. His first name is "Black."
• "To infinity and beyond!" Find me and you'll find the egg.
• You hide here every time it is time to go have your bath.

The last egg had a different color note inside, which Tristan noticed right away. It provided a drawing of where his prize was located. Unfortunately, Tristan didn't get the drawing at all. Jean-Louis had to help him.

Overall, Tristan did extremely well. We did the egg hunt first thing in the morning when we woke up. I didn't want to risk him accidentally running into the hidden eggs. He was super excited when we first started. Near the end, he was a bit distracted and didn't really want to hear clues anymore. At one point, he went around randomly and searched for eggs. We told him the game didn't work like that. Then after it was all done, he kept asking why there aren't any more eggs to look for. When the Easter basket was handed over, he let him eat a bit of the chocolate right away. Then we sat down for our regular breakfast.

The "prize"

This was the first egg hunt I planned. My parents bought chocolate eggs for us when we were kids and they randomly hid them outside. It was hard to find them and I'm pretty sure some were forgotten completely. I love these planned egg hunts a lot better :)

This was Tristan's first egg hunt. He didn't really get it but he is still learning. We tried to explain it to him the day before to prepare him. When he woke up he knew there was an egg hunt so he dashed off and told us he was going to hide the eggs. I think he was referring to the eggs we painted the other day. My guess was he was going to the fridge to grab those eggs and hide them. No, no, no.

This was Jean-Louis' first egg hunt. He doesn't remember any egg hunt but that doesn't really surprise me because he grew up in France and the French don't go crazy with the chocolate, eggs, or presents. He comes from a Catholic family and they just go to church and have a nice traditional meal. It's only in the past 5 years or so that the crazy North American culture of chocolate eggs has crept into France. It's all for commercialization.

EASTER DAY FEAST

This year is the first year we ever had a vegetarian Easter. That's right, no meat! We had some eggs in the salad and a bit of cheese in the gougères, else it would have been a vegan Easter. Actually, we had non-vegan cupcakes too. Anyhow, the food was great and it was not a big deal at all. We had a vegan dish which resembled steak but was made from chickpeas and gluten. Psychologically, I guess we thought we were having meat and we were satisfied :)

Chickpea cutlets

Valentine's feast and goodies (in pictures)

Valentine loot bag from daycare

The largest prawns I have ever seen!

Still super large after cooking.

Dinner: butter chicken, giant prawns in black soy, spinach/cabbage stirfry

Nutella cake with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and ganache

A chocolate lover's dream! Oh soooo good:)

Spiderman heart cookies for Valentines

When you have kids, Valentines feels a little like Christmas. Or is it just me?

This year Tristan is in the bigger kid room at daycare and there are twice as many kids in there compared to the toddler room last year. There are also more staff members. Just like last year, I decided to bake sugar cookies again. Who doesn't like a sugar cookie, right?

I had a few fun heart designs sketched out but when I went to fill out the names on the Valentines cards, I had a great idea! Tristan is into Spiderman these days so everyone in his class will be getting Spiderman Valentine cards. I kept looking at Spiderman on the cards thinking how he was so red and that he could very well be on a cookie for Valentines. I remembered coming across a strawberry design which used heart cookie cutters on Pinterest and thought it was a cool idea. I could do the same thing with Spiderman! And wouldn't it be totally cool to match the Valentine cookie with the Valentine card?? Oh yeah :) Then I googled and found out that everyone has already done it. Duh.

Ingredient list was included in each of the cookies

I'm happy with the results, even though it took me awhile to get at it. I ran into problems when I ran out of ingredients and I didn't have enough icing. I cheated by diluting the icing and flooding my cookies only to get really bad grainy results when it dried. Don't even think about diluting your icing man!!! It was disastrous and it turned pink instead of red. Then I bought more ingredients and made more icing and mixed more red and finally got it right. I had to mix red three times so all the cookies actually have three different shades of red. Oh well. If you look close, there are imperfections everywhere! I don't think the 3-5 year olds at daycare will judge me too much though, right? Lesson learned.

 

The kids are all getting the chocolate sugar cookies with the Spiderman heart design but the staff will each get a red velvet cupcake. I had to do a batch for Jean-Louis to take to work tomorrow for his potluck anyway so it worked out well. This is the second time I have made these cupcakes. I added more cocoa to them this time and got a deeper red as a result as well. I love cocoa! I substituted about half of the white sugar for yellow cane sugar. I also used my favorite whipped cream cheese frosting instead of the one in the recipe and it worked much better for piping since it uses granulated sugar instead of icing sugar. Icing sugar tends to turn liquid when in contact with cream cheese and a runny icing isn't very pretty. By the way, if anyone is wondering, cupcakes are so much easier to make than sugar cookies! Decorating cookies is what kills you, especially if you run into problems.

Happy Valentines Day!

See those sprinkles? Homemade using dried up royal icing:)

More photos from Chinese New Year