8/52 - Birthday Cake, School Lunch, and Alton Brown

We've been long-time fans of Alton Brown, even hosting our own Alton Brown Dinner Parties over the years. So we jumped at the opportunity to see his Alton Brown Live tour.

He used the same crazy props and weird camera angles that were a signature feature of Good Eats.

His live show featured all of the things that he couldn't do on television. As one example, his Food Network censors required that his yeast puppets (see above) emitted 7 burps for each 1 fart. (Who knew?) So for his live show, he reversed the ratio. He made ice cream in 10 seconds with a CO² fire extinguisher, and cooked pizza in a 54,000W, 1 million lumen Mega Bake Oven made from stage lighting, his adult homage to the Easy Bake Oven. The show was great fun.

Sometime between when we bought the tickets (last year) and the night of the show, we started watching Good Eats episodes with Anders. Since we have the episodes from all 14 seasons, we would have Anders choose a food or cooking topic and then consult the Good Eats Fan Page to find a relevant episode to watch. Anders is now also a big fan and thinks Alton is hilarious. Anders kept asking why we didn't buy him a ticket, but we didn't know he was going to be such a big fan! We will be sure to make it an all family outing the next time he comes around.

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Happy Birthday, Grandma Donna! To celebrate, we baked a chocolate cake with coconut butter cream frosting and decorated the top to remind us that spring is on its way.

For her birthday, we gave Grandma Donna a cool picture frame for housing Anders' artwork. The day before the celebration, she and Anders had this conversation:

A: We have a birthday present for you.
GD: What is it?
A: I can't tell you! It's a surprise! ... but the first word is picture and the second word starts with an f.

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Anders's school is small; each grade is only about 12-20 students, and everyone is in the same building from K-12. They didn't have a "hot lunch" program in the school until about two years ago. They have some of the school lunch standards, like hot dogs, fish and chips and the like, but they have worked hard to make their menus more interesting than the average school. For example, currently they have an "International Tuesday" theme featuring different cuisines.

On one Tuesday in February, they featured Thai Chicken and Rice:

A few weeks later, Indian Butter Chicken and Dal:

Parents are welcome to join the students for lunch, so we jumped at the chance.

It's the only place in Trout Lake to get ethnic foods! Besides the school, there are only two other places to eat in town. And at a cost of $3.25 per adult, it's the best meal deal going. I'm sure we will be back.

- Mike, Corinne, and Anders