How To Serve Kids

The great shame of my life is that Young Master Fussy continues to put ketchup on his hot dogs. Oddly, I’m not dismayed at all that both children mix ketchup into their Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. However, the sight and smell of the latter totally nauseates Mrs. Fussy.

On the flip side, one of the kiddo’s big treats is a small tasting glass of aged balsamic vinegar that he enjoys straight, taking tiny sips of the sweet nectar. Little Miss Fussy enjoys my homemade popcorn topped with some very fine extra virgin olive oil and kosher salt.

The bottom line here is that I don’t really want to feed the kids junk, but they would be just as happy with a frozen pizza as they would be with a steak dinner. In all honesty, they would probably prefer my Cuban black beans to any of it, but I don’t think that’s normal.

However, this isn’t about my children. Because for one night last weekend, we were doubling the juvenile population at La Casa de Fussy, and I was making dinner for more kids than parents. I wanted to make something good, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. So naturally I headed down to Adventure in Food Trading.

I spoke with Todd over there, and he wasn’t convinced that kids would go for wild boar sausage. My hope was that they would have some kind of hot dog made from happy meat, like the kind that come from Applegate. Once I had seen an Applegate Pepperoni in their walk-in that was longer than my arm. But the closest they had were Kobe beef hot dogs.

However, they did happen to have a three-pound pack of frozen Kilcoyne Farm pasture-raised beef sliders.

These were kind of brilliant, because the pack contained 24 two-ounce patties that were thin, but a bit over three inches wide. The sliders were vacuum sealed and the patties were divided by wax paper, making it easy to portion out plenty of patties for the dinner, and put the rest away for another day.

Todd had suggested double patties for everyone.

That would be wrong. The kids get one patty, adults get two. Kids care more about ketchutp and bread than meat. Plus you never know when kids will walk away from good food, leaving it half uneaten to get up and play when their friends are around. And while these are wholesale frozen burgers, they are still about as expensive as fresh factory-farmed ribeye from the grocery store.

AiF is a dangerous place. Besides the beef, I also walked out of there with a small tub of Maplebrook Farm Burrata and a half pound of Maytag blue cheese which would both be used in service of the dinner. Plus there was the andouille sausage and tasso ham I picked up for a future red beans and rice project. And I’m also the proud owner of a bottle of fig molasses, which I won in their December Facebook contest.

Buns, as it turns out, were easy to find.

Hannaford carries small rolls from Mastroianni Bros. of Schenectady, which has been producing brick oven baked breads for the better part of a century. These contain only flour, water, yeast, salt, dough conditioner and calcium propionate. More importantly, they were the perfect size for the sliders.

For local cheese I remembered the Adams Reserve Cheddar from a past Eat Local Challenge, and I was able to pick that up at Hannaford too along with the rolls.

The burgers got defrosted, seasoned with salt and pepper, and cooked in a medium-high cast iron skillet. Buns got toasted. Cheese got melted. Most of the kids ate most of their food. The adults got treated to blue cheese and some super sliced mushrooms sautéed in beef tallow. Plus we big people didn’t share much (if any) of the burrata with the kids.

Honestly, the sliders weren’t as tender and juicy as the full-sized Kilcoyne burger I enjoyed at Taste for lunch. This could have to do with the form or the fact that these started out frozen. However, they are great for kids. Not only can you feel good about feeding them to your children. But you can also feel okay about throwing away half-uneaten burgers, given their modest size.