Kids Cook! Egg Custard Tarts

With Easter just around the corner, I have eggs on the brain. My go-to egg recipes usually include quiche and breakfast casseroles. But what about the egg custard tart? This dim sum treat is typically not incorporated into the Easter spread at our house, but with its creamy, sweet custard center cradled in a flaky pastry crust, it's a perfect addition for spring.

Enlisting the help of my 3YO son, I tested a recipe for the tarts from The Young Chef’s Chinese Cookbook. This cookbook breaks down the tart recipe into eight delightfully simple steps. Pictures accompany each step, and show each ingredient and utensil used so you can’t go wrong.  A "Tips & Tricks" section (at the end of each recipe) lists essential info for each recipe. According to this recipe, the "trick" to making a perfect egg custard is to make sure that all ingredients for the filling (eggs, milk, and cream) are at room temperature--to avoid curdling during baking.

While some of the steps were too advanced for my 3YO (cracking eggs and measuring the liquid ingredients), he was able help with most of the recipe.


      

                       (beating the eggs and pressing the pie crust into tins)

We cooked the tarts an extra fifteen minutes to achieve a beautiful browned custard top (my oven temperature might be a little off--I need to check this). After waiting a painfully long amount of time, until they cooled completely, we taste-tested the tarts.  

 
       
      The verdict? Yum! A recipe we will try again.

The crust was crunchy and flaky, and carmelized where the the sugary-custard filling had spilled over the tart tins, while the center was smooth and creamy, sweet and rich (like a slighly-eggy Crème Brûlée). My son gobbled down the tart within two minutes, leaving me only crumbs to finish.  Thankfully, the recipe made five additional tarts (yield is not mentioned in the recipe) to savor over the next few days.   


Want the recipe?  Check out the Young Chef's Chinese Cookbook at your local library, or check out these links: Irvin Lin's Caramel Egg Custard Tart at "Eat the Love"  and Cantonese Egg Custard Tart at Christine's Recipes.  


What are your favorite egg-related recipes for spring? 

Keeping in Touch: Sharing Milestones through Facebook

This week we celebrated two milestones in our family:  my son turned three and my daughter donated 12 inches of her shiny, brown hair to Wigs4Kids (a small non-profit in Michigan that provides wigs for kids with hair loss).  

            

We celebrated both events in our family of four (cake and presents for my son, hugs and pictures for my daughter), but longed to share the milestones with our extended family spread across the United States and China.

Thanks to iChat, we were able to connect with one grandparent (aka “Momish”) and one aunt and uncle.  In December, I posted about how iChat connected us with our family in China on Christmas Day.  Since then, we’ve discovered that this mode of communication is wonderful, when my mother-in-law has access to a good network connection in China (which isn’t often) and when we find the magic hour of the day when we are both awake (there is a thirteen-hour time difference).

This week, we summoned the power of Facebook to share highlights of my kids’ big days with several of our English-speaking extended family in Europe and Asia.  Although Facebook irks me (and others, I’m sure) on a regular basis due it’s frequent format changes, we are discovering it is a wonderful tool for keeping in touch with my husband’s English-speaking cousins. Prior to becoming Facebook “friends,” we kept in touch with my husband’s cousins pretty infrequently, whenever we made trips to China or through an occasional phone call. All of this changed minutes after I accepted their “friend” requests.

Now, they keep up-to-date with the latest goings-on in our household. They “like” my daughter’s new haircut and comment on my postings of my son’s latest antics. Cynics (or at least the cynical voice in my head) may say that this is only shallow communication, and that we're not connecting on a deep, meaningful level. Perhaps.  But we are communicating! And in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural family like ours (German, Japanese, Chinese, and American), communication on any level is remarkable and a step in the right direction.

How do you use Facebook to keep in touch with family who live in other countries? 

Children's Books about Chinese Food

How do you introduce your kids (picky eaters included) to new Chinese food in a fun, low-pressure way?  Read to them! Here are two of my favorite children's books about Chinese food that are sure to entertain both kids and adults, and might even make your tummy rumble!

For Young Readers (Picture Book):

 The Runaway Wok by Ying Chang Compestine (Penguin Dutton, 2011)

The Runaway Wok is the story of a poor peasant boy, Ming, who trades his family’s last eggs for a magic wok.  Soon the wok is galloping throughout Beijing stealing succulent dishes, toys, and money from the stingy but wealthy Li family, and depositing these goodies at Ming’s house. Ming’s family distributes the goods to the whole village, who then celebrate Chinese New Year together as the wok whisks the Li family out of town.  Parents will appreciate the author’s note about the Chinese New Year and recipe for Festive Fried Rice at the back of the book.  Kids will love the lively story and colorful illustrations.  If you like this book, check out Compestine’s The Runaway Rice Cake (2001), another Chinese New Year tale involving magic and food.

For Older Readers (Chapter Book):

 Dumpling Days by Grace Lin (Little, Brown, 2012)

In this sequel to Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat, heroine Pacy travels with her family to Taiwan to visit family and celebrate grandmother’s sixtieth birthday.  During the twenty-eight day visit, Pacy and her sisters share many new experiences: watching Chinese opera at a temple in Taichung, mailing postcards from the tallest building in Taipei, and sampling new foods at the night market.  In fact the entire book, as the title suggests, is full of food. Lin’s descriptions and illustrations of the new foods that Pacy tries will delight young and old alike: soft-skinned peach buns, steaming Chinese dumpling soup, crisp and sweet wax apples. The Lin sisters also experience Taiwanese culture through art classes that their mother has signed them up for.  These classes are initially a source of frustration for Pacy, who struggles with brush technique despite being “good at art” back in the United States.  The classes are a lens through which Lin depicts Pacy’s conflicted feelings about her Taiwanese-American identity--at times, the heroine feels like she doesn’t fit in and other times, she feels invisible (due to the language barrier), feelings that Lin resolves toward the end of the book.

In addition to Lin’s mouth-watering descriptions of food and her simple but poignant approach to cultural identity, I love the small illustrations that intersperse the chapters:  how to hold chopsticks (Chpt 2), instructions for making dumplings (Chpt 4), and a collection of all the different dumplings Pacy sampled (last page).  Also, your young reader will be tickled to see the small flipbook illustration of a crossing light on the corner of the each page. When you flip through the pages, the figure on the crossing light “walks” and the number counts down from forty to zero—brilliant!

If you like this book, check out Lin’s other books.  Themes of food run through her other chapter books, Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat, as well as her picture books, Dim Sum for Everyone, Bringing in the New Year, and Thanking the Moon.

What are your favorite children's books about Chinese food?