The Annotated Ankle Biter

Causa Rellena is a Peruvian appetizer that I happily eat as a main course. It is layers of golden potato flavoured with lemon and golden aji amarillo, with a layer of—in this case chicken salad, but tuna salad is also good—in between, and garnished with hard-boiled egg, red pepper, green onion, and cilantro. Causa Rellena isn’t an Easter dish, but it is a great way to use any uneaten hard-boiled eggs.

One of my reasons for feeding this dish to kids is that it is mostly made up of things they like. There are a few chopped veggies as garnish, but by my theory of veggies by approximation—the veggies might accidentally end up on the fork, or kids might be tempted to eat them through frequent, but benign exposure.

Ingredients

Potato

• 2.2 lb (1 kg ) potatoes (yellow or Yukon gold, if available)
• ¼ cup olive oil
• juice of 2 lemons
• 2 Tbsp. of aji amarillo
• salt to taste

Filling

• 2-3 cups of cooked, chicken (white meat), chopped small
• ¼ cup of celery, chopped small
• 4 green onions, chopped finely
• fresh cilantro, chopped or snipped, to taste
• ½ cup of mayonnaise
• salt to taste

Garnish

• 2 boiled eggs cut into quarters
• fresh cilantro, chopped or snipped, to taste
• red pepper slices
• green tops of the green onions, chopped or snipped, to taste

Preparation

Mash the potatoes, and mix in the olive oil, lemon juice, aji amarillo, and salt. If you get the proportions of salt, lemon, and aji amarillo balanced, you can taste each flavour and none of the flavours overpowers the others.

Chop the chicken and mix in the mayonnaise, celery, white part of the green onion—reserving the green tops for the garnish—and salt. I’ve noticed that the green onion is great for seasoning mayonnaise if you don’t like the taste of mayonnaise.

Causa in a dish:
Place half the potato mixture on the bottom of a rectangular platter. Put the chicken mixture in the middle, and place the other half of the potato mixture on top.

Causa on a platter:
Spread potato in one long rectangular layer on top of some plastic wrap. Spread chicken on one third of the potato layer; then use the plastic to roll it like a jelly roll. Transfer to a platter.

Cover with plastic wrap and chill until cold. Garnish with cilantro, green onion, red pepper slices, and hard-boiled eggs.

Serve cold, cut into squares about 2-3 inches wide.

Notes
Aji amarillo: this is the Spanish name for a paste made from a medium-hot chili with a beautiful golden colour.
Salt: Maldon sea salt is great with in the potato with the lemon and the aji amarillo.

This was my first attempt at making an Easter Egg Tree. I used pussy willow branches, and I coloured my eggs with an Easter Egg kit that had dye tabs you dissolve in water (and vinegar) instead of food colour. I’m going to try food colour next year because the tabs didn’t dissolve completely. There were little lumps floating around in the water, and the eggs came out a bit spotted from lumps of dye that settled on them.

Blowing out the eggs was harder than I thought. I cracked my first egg from being a bit to forceful with my needle. Also, I wanted to keep the holes small, but if the bottom hole is too small, the egg yolk won’t come out. I used a turkey baster as my egg blowing tool to force the egg out the other side. It worked fine in a pinch. It’s a bit long, but I don’t see the point of owning an egg blower.

Hanging the eggs proved to be tricky. I didn’t have any luck trying to knot some thread and thread it through the egg, so I got out my Elmer’s Extra Strength Glue Stick, and this worked like a dream. I glued the ribbon around the egg, and sewed it together at the top of the egg. Then I just tied a knot in the ribbon at the top. I need to work on my decorating, so the ribbon really save the day.

Links

I’ve put together a list of my favourite Easter craft ideas here.

Some of my favourite links for Easter celebration inspiration.

Easter Egg Decorating

1. Beautiful felt-covered decorative eggs
   http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/felt_easter_eggs.htm
2. Easter egg coloring tips
   http://www.eggs.ab.ca/recipes/craftcorner/dyeing.html
3. How to make leaf imprints on Easter eggs
   http://www.ehow.com/how_2223920_leaf-imprints-easter-eggs.html
4. Egg Blow Out
   http://www.wikihow.com/Blow-Out-Eggs

Easter Egg Tree

1. Easter egg tree centerpiece using cut branches and decorated, blown eggs
   http://www.marthastewart.com/good-things/easter-egg-tree
2. Hanging your eggs on the easter egg tree
   http://www.eggs.ab.ca/recipes/craftcorner/tree.html

Easter Basket

1. Easter Basket Favors—individual easter baskets made from paper cups and crepe paper
   http://www.marthastewart.com/good-things/easter-basket-favors

Easter Activities

1. Egg Rolling and other Easter Activities
   http://people.howstuffworks.com/easter5.htm

Easter Bonnet

1. Flower Crown
   http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/hats/flowerhat/

I was quite optimistic about my daughter’s eating habits when at one year old she was fond of gnawing on pickles, sucking the salad dressing off of my caesar salad, and slurping down her carrot soup. She still likes some healthy food, but somewhere between 1 and 2, she stopped eating any vegetables except tomato sauce.

A while back, I watched a program on Discovery Health about school children’s eating habits. Psychologists claimed that the most effective way to get a child to eat something he or she doesn’t like is to use peer pressure. They got a bunch of child celebrities who liked eating vegetables to go to a school, meet the kids, then eat lunch with them. The children saw their peers eating vegetables and enjoying them, so they decided to try eating them too. The experiment ended with all of the kids eating their vegetables.

Since setting up a situation where you can use peer pressure to influence your child’s diet can be tricky, they then went on to describe the next most effective way to get your child to eat something he or she doesn’t like: accustom your child to the food by eating a small amount daily. A boy who couldn’t stand avocado agreed to eat one small cube of avocado every day for 20 days. The theory was that after repeatedly tasting the food, the child’s palate would change, and the child would actually start to like the food. The upshot was that after 20 days, the boy thought that avocado wasn’t too bad. So it was conceivable that after time he might like it.

I went away from the show thinking that was something to store in the back of my head for when my daughter was older. I was bemused and amused the day I made spaghetti with meat sauce expecting to have to pick the lumps of meat out of the sauce, as usual, for my daughter, when she said “Meatballs!” I remembered that she’d just seen an episode of her favourite TV program, Pinky Dinky Doo, where Pinky and Mr. Guinea Pig are super spaghetti tightrope walkers. Since then, she has enthusiastically eaten the meatballs in her spaghetti sauce.

The other day, she wanted to eat a pickle. She hasn’t eaten pickles since she stopped eating them at around one year of age. I remembered that in a recent episode of Pinky Dinky Doo, Pinky needs a musical instrument, and tries to play a pickle because pickle sounds like piccolo.

Still, the peer pressure is not easy to arrange. So I get her to have one small bite of a food she doesn’t like. She doesn’t mind having one small taste. I’ll see if that helps.

One of the goals of this blog is to make note of anything that notably enhances or diminishes the serenity of my life as a parent. The “little things” didn’t seem as important before. In the larger scheme of things, the words “don’t sweat the small stuff” are great advice. But time, energy, money, and never forget sleep are all key elements in the formula that keeps my stress level down. Consequently, the little things aren’t so little, and it’s a joy and a relief when things work the way they are supposed to and a disaster when they don’t.

I have to say that I’ve been 95%-100% disappointed by adhesive mounting strips. Let me explain why.

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