"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
---Walter Elias Disney

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Disney Dinner, At Home!!!!

What's better than a night of Disney Parks behind the scenes shows on the TV? That would be sharing the fun with friends and turning it into a Disney food feast, of course! The food at Disney is one of our favorite parts of the experience, and it's fun and surprisingly easy to try duplicating some of Disney's dishes at home. Chip and Co. have recipes on their site and Disney cookbooks aren't hard to find. Our cookbook is almost 20 years old, so it has recipes from restaurants that no longer exist, which is kind of cool, really. Our feast included treats from Ohana, the Yachtsman Steakhouse, Le Cellier, the old Top of the World and a couple classic treats from the parks.

Jen's Ohana Wings and my own Onion-Cheese Soup
We started out with what my son has declared "the BEST chicken wings ever. Seriously. Ever"  and onion-cheese soup. The wings Jen made are part of the Ohana family-style dinner and are truly delicious. The soup was my contribution and came from our old Gourmet Mickey Cookbook attributed to the Yachtsman Steakhouse at the Yacht Club Resort. I've had neither dish at the actual Disney location, but Jen says the wings pretty much nailed it. The soup may or may not be exactly like Disney's, but it was really good.

Poutine = Heaven
After devouring the wings and soup around the campfire, we moved inside for Jen's Poutine, a wonderful potato dish from the Canada Pavilion's Le Cellier restaurant. Poutine is basically baked potato wedges topped with caramelized onion and cheese, then covered with a red wine reduction sauce. While that may sound good, words can't describe the deliciousness of this dish. The reduction alone is good enough to eat with a spoon.


Lisa's Mickey Treats-on-a-stick!
For dessert, my lovely bride Lisa provided a classic Disney Parks treat, the Mickey Head Rice Crispy Treat! What could be better than a rice crispy treat that looks like Mickey, on a stick, with ears dipped in dark chocolate? Nothing. Period. For post-dessert TV watching treats we had Dole Whips! Both straight up and in a float, these things are hard to replicate exactly without a soft-serve machine, but ours were awesome and topped off a spectacular night.


Monorail Yellow
Disney also offers some fun and unique cocktails. The beverage I chose to accompany our meal may or may not be offered somewhere on the Disney property today, I don't know. It's the Monorail Yellow cocktail from the old Top of the World restaurant, the place that used to be at the top of the Contemporary resort. Top of the World has been replaced by the California Grill, but we brought the Monorail Yellow back for an encore. The original is a frozen concoction, but I turned it into a martini because I didn't want to bother getting out a blender. It worked nicely.


Trying to re-create some of your favorite Disney cuisine is fun and, thanks to the interwebs, not really hard. If you want to try for yourself, you can start searching either Chip and Co.'s recipe page or the Disney Family web site's recipe pages 

2 comments:

  1. Where did you get the poutine recipe?

    ReplyDelete
  2. ^ What they said... Just had it at Le Cellier and wish to make it at home!

    ReplyDelete