that a great way to celebrate our family's foray into language learning would be to invite a couple of friends for a Mexican dinner that we would shop for, cook, and eat together. With the idea that the kids would do most of the cooking, we picked the simplest menu: tacos, black beans, fruit salad and liquados (fruit smoothies), with ice cream for dessert. I looked for as many ways as possible to incorporate what we had learned into the preparation and the meal itself.
A few days before our dinner, the girls and I went to a party-supply store, where they picked out a piñata, and I succumbed to some paper flowers (my personal decorating weakness). We dug through our Christmas decorations to find strings of tiny, colored lights and made Cascarones, confetti-filled eggs to crack over each other's heads. We pulled out our Mexican pottery and borrowed more from friends.
The day of our dinner, I made a grocery list in Spanish and took the kids to the store. While I stayed at the front of the store with a list, I asked them in Spanish to get the ingredients we needed. Taking a cue fromMR. RABBIT AND THE LOVELY PRESENTby Charlotte Zolotow (HarperCollins, $4.50), I had the kids buy a rainbow assortment of fruits for the fruit salad: purple grapes, a red apple, an orange, a yellow apple, a green apple, and a box of blueberries. Expect that you will need to engage in a little miming, and that your kids will fetch some items only after trial and error. They will have a wonderful time.
Back at the house, I started the kids on the black beans, first washing and picking them over, and then counting out--in Spanish, of course--10 cups of water to pour into the pot. Once the beans were cooking, we turned our attention to decorating the dining room and setting the table. As we went along, I tried to teach them a little of the vocabulary. Once everything else was set, the kids stuffed the piñata, and I tuned the radio to a Spanish-language station broadcasting lots of South-of-the-border music. Back in the kitchen, closer to dinner, the children prepared the taco filling (spicy beef); grated cheese and carrots; cut up tomatoes and lettuce; and prepped the fruit salad. I refried the beans and helped the kids get their ingredients into serving bowls. The kids decided what kind of liquados to drink, blended them up, and poured them into heavy Mexican stemware. We were ready. Before we sat down, I told everyone that only Spanish was to be spoken at the table; next time I do this, I will tie red ribbons around each guest's wrists as a special reminder. Even though there were lots of outbursts in English (including a few from me, which delighted the kids), it contributed to the specialness of the event. Even Anna, who usually picks at her food when we go out for tacos, turned to me before getting into bed and said, "That was the best dinner I ever had."
