A friend from my MBA program came to Utah with his family for a month long vacation. They spent a week at our house and we decided to cook a country style meal for them. Dutch oven potatoes, dutch oven chicken and for dessert, S’mores!
Here we are with our custom fire pit. Out in the sticks we can do what we want so we just dug a hole and filled it with some wood and charcoals.
After eating, we pulled out the bag of marshmallows. They had never had one before and we had a hard time trying to explain just what a marshmallow is. How would you explain it? Here’s Chris helping little Elena with her first ever S’more.
When we thought about it, they were Ollie’s and Elora’s first S’mores too! It’s so sweet the way Elora tenderly holds whatever she has when you ask to take her picture. It could be a weed, rock, flower, bug, penny, anything, and she has the same sweet “I’m just thrilled to hold this” face.
This is a great picture of Ollie, because this sums up what he looks like when he’s hungry and chowing down. Mess everywhere! He was especially happy because we used Ritter chocolate for the S’mores (we brought a diminishing supply back home with us).
At first we tried to explain to Manfred and Ingrid that S’mores really weren’t that good, but it was just something you “have to do” around a campfire. Then as we found out, a S’more tastes a heck of a lot better if you don’t use crappy Hershey’s chocolate. They were awesome with the good quality chocolate from Austria!
Here’s Ollie sharing marshmallows with Yoda. Here he is saying, “Look, Yoda likes marshmallows!!!” Ollie liked them too, I think he ate about 10.
Notice in this picture Manfred is giving Marion her first graham cracker. She was very happy with him after that. Manfred and Luis were also happy to eat the S’mores. We told them the trick is to get them brown without burning or blackening them. Which requires a lot of patience and turning. I love how descriptive the German language is at describing food, because within seconds they invented their own vocab for describing the perfect marshmallow – “ein brauner”. In English if you referred to your own perfectly cooked marshmallow as a “browner” it would just sound weird but it works in German.
Since Austrians are very descriptive with their food, they assumed a S’more meant something. They asked, “What does S’more mean?” We didn’t really have a good answer, but just said it means you want “some more”. Not really descriptive of the type of food though… but everyone did want some more.
And then we played with the fire. A favorite past time of all children, and Chris.
Finally, Elora went over to ride Yoda and called herself a cowgirl. Yoda doesn’t look too happy here, but don’t feel bad for him. He got to chow down on all the left over potatos with bacon and chicken. He was a very happy dog!
