Dea Birkett's Eating with Kids: A Fantastically Foul Feast with Roald
by Dea Birkett
9 September 2008
Yuck – it’s so yummy. There’s nothing quite so tasty as disgusting food. Try and get my kids to eat meatballs and passata, and they’ll turn up their little noses. Tell them the same dish is eyeballs oozing blood, and they’ll scoff them down.
I get most of my revolting recipes not from a master chef, but from storybooks. And the master of all these culinary taletellers is Roald Dahl. So while other families have celebratory meals for Easter or Thanksgiving, we have one for Roald Dahl Day on September 13th. The menu may consist of Fresh Mudburgers, Snozzcumbers and Squiggly Spaghetti, all borrowed from Dahl books. But I also do my own really good Severed Toe Toast (jammy bread fingers) and a mean Blood Patty (pizza). It’s not what food tastes or even looks like that warms my kids’ tummies. It’s the story attached.
So our search for the world’s best disgusting food has taken us to the Roald Dahl Museum in annoyingly twee Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. It’s the sort of English countryside that usually turns my stomach. High streets lined with tea rooms where waitresses dressed as extra’s from some bad BBC Victorian drama serve you rock-hard scones and UHT cream, calling it an English tradition.
But between all this food fakery, there’s a place with genuine taste. Café Twit at the Roald Dahl Museum serves scrumptious homemade food the author himself would be proud of. Bogtrotter Chocolate Cake is my kids’ favourite, though thankfully not devoured in such large quantities as Bruce Bogtrotter himself does in Matilda. The cakes are baked by Tiffany Crouch, who runs Revolting Recipe workshops at the café, who sounds like a storybook character herself.
The moral of this particular tale is that, for my kids at least, the story surrounding the dish in front of them is as important as the taste. Meals are all the more delicious when washed down with a stomping good yarn.
Next meal: Traditional Sunday lunch
Dea Birkett
September 2008
Useful information about Roald Dahl and Roald Dahl Day:
Dea and family ate at Café Twit at the Roald Dahl Museum, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
(The Roald Dahl Museum is featured in Rough Guide to Accessible Britain, handy not only for disabled people but parents with buggies.)
Roald Dahl Day is an annual event held on September 13th. You can also download the revolting recipe for Gigantuous Chocolate Mud Cake.
Find Roald Dahl books, dvds and more from partners Amazon.
At Eureka museum in Halifax, you can make your own Roald Dahl revolting recipes.
Do you have something to share about eating out with kids? Do you have tips on how to making eating out easier? Then please go to our forum .
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