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Disney Food for Families: An Ode to the Sand Bucket

Disney Food for Families columnist Erin Foster discusses a great bonus you can find with some kids’ meals on Walt Disney World property!

It’s long been said that Disney is in the details. One of my favorite Disney details is the container for children’s meals at some of the counter service restaurants at Walt Disney World. What is this magical container? The sand bucket!

Buckets ready to be called into action

There are restaurants located near the pools or sandy areas at Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon, the Yacht & Beach Clubs, and the Caribbean Beach Resort that serve their kids’ meals either in, or with, a new, [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: Learning Opportunities for the Budding Chef

By Erin 6 Comments

Disney Food for Families columnist Erin Foster captures some great ways to encourage your kids’ love of cooking!

Obviously one of the many reasons that families find Disney destinations to be such compelling vacation spots is that the parks and resorts are fully prepared to accommodate the interests of children. At various points, all of my girls have been captivated with the idea of becoming a chef (well, at least until they began to realize that kitchens have to be cleaned after they are used).

Disney does a wonderful job of indulging the interests of the budding chef by allowing children, and their parents, plentiful opportunities to observe and interact with the real-life culinary craftspeople that make the food magic happen.

Where to Learn from the Masters: Sweets

Our favorite Walt Disney World venue for chef interaction is at Goofy’s Candy Company at Downtown Disney. On one recent trip, my girls and I spent over an hour standing at the candy prep counter there watching a cast member make pan after pan of swoon-inducing fudge.

Fudge prep at Goofy's Candy Company

We have found that the cast members there are particularly gracious in taking the time to explain to curious bystanders exactly what they are doing, and why. We’ve even been offered small tasting spoonfuls of warm fudge batter to better assess the product as it transforms from [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: A Parent’s Dilemma — Multi-Line Quick Service

By Erin 33 Comments

Disney Food for Families columnist Erin Foster ponders how to avoid lost kids and cold food at the multi-line quick service locations like Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe and Sunshine Seasons.

While I am obviously a fan of Disney dining in general, there is one particular aspect of eating at Walt Disney World that, as a parent, I find maddening: the multi-line quick service restaurant.

For those of you new to eating at WDW, some of the quick service (otherwise known as counter service) restaurants are set up with one order/payment line for all types of food items served there. The out-of-Disney-World analogy to this would be McDonald’s or similar fast food restaurants where you walk up to the cashier and tell him you want a burger, your husband wants chicken, and your daughter wants a salad. You pay and they give you all your food on one tray. Makes sense, right?

Epcot's Electric Umbrella. Single-line quick service. Many foods, one place to order.

However, many quick service restaurants on Disney property do not follow this model. Instead of one place to order all the items sold at that location, there are multiple lines. One line to order burgers, one line to order chicken, one line to order salads, and so on. The out-of-Disney-World analogy to this is the mall food court.

Multi-line, food-court-style, quick service restaurant.

So, Here’s the Problem

The multi-line quick service restaurant became my personal pet peeve way back in 1998, during our first trip to WDW with our oldest daughter, who was not quite two years old at the time. We were staying at [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: Steal This Idea – The Rice Krispie Treat Vinylmation

By Erin 7 Comments

Disney Food for Families columnist Erin Foster has a fun project for anyone who’s ever loved rice krispie treats and vinylmation!

Second only to my family’s love of Disney food is our love of Disney Vinylmation. These collectible figurines all start with the same Mickey-shaped base, but are designed by artists to resemble other characters, park elements, cultural touchstones, or random cool designs. My daughters and I have spent many a happy hour in the parks hunting for and trading Vinylmations. Some of our favorite finds have been food-themed Vinyls.

Food themed Vinylmations

We’ve been impressed with the execution of classic Disney-food items in Vinyl: the Mickey bar, the turkey leg, the box of popcorn. One day while speculating about which delicious icon might be Vinylized next, my daughter Josie came up with the idea that Disney should make a Rice Krispie treat themed Vinylmation — a plastic depiction of the [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families Review: Behind the Seeds Tour in Epcot

By Erin 17 Comments

Disney Food for Families Columnist Erin Foster takes us backstage on on the Behind the Seeds Tour in Epcot’s The Land pavilion.

Back in the day, we pulled our girls out of school a few times to go to Disney World (shhh, don’t tell). To assuage my guilt, I tried to work some educational content into these trips. One of my attempts at intellectual betterment resulted in signing the family up for the Behind the Seeds tour at the Land pavilion at Epcot. Learning! About food!

As it turns out, we really did have such a great time learning about, and trying, the foods in the Land, we’ve been back on the tour twice more.

Behind the Seeds is an hour-long walk through much of the growing areas seen during the Living with the Land boat ride. If you’ve ever been on the boat and wondered who those rock star folks were walking around in the gardens, well, those are the Behind the Seeds people. Don’t forget to wave.

On the tour, you're actually in the attraction

Tours are lead by members of the botanical team at the Land. These are often graduate students in the agricultural sciences. Personally, I’m not a gardener, but if you did have a technical question, the guides would [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: 10 Tips for Dining with Teens at Walt Disney World

By Erin 11 Comments

A new post in our Disney Food for Families Column by Erin Foster:

In the early days of my family’s Disney travel, we routinely went to at least one character meal every day, sometimes two. On my twins’ sixth birthday, we even ate at three character meals in one day. My waistline is still trying to recover!

Bonding at the Food & Wine Festival

But now that my girls are older, the character meals hold somewhat less appeal for them. My daughter Charlie, now 14, even went through a phase where she was (Yikes!) “too cool” for characters. My challenge has become, “How do you keep the magic of Disney Dining alive without relying on the classic character meal?” In other words: How do you make Disney Dining fun for teens?

Idea #1: Make the vacation about the food.
I have been to Walt Disney World twice with just Charlie during the Epcot Food & Wine Festival. We spent a couple of days working our way around the World Showcase booths, trying to sample at least one or two things from each represented country. This sparked some interesting discussions about food taste, texture, and preparation styles. We had bonding moments over our mutual favorite: the beef with chimichurri sauce from Argentina stand. More please. And we shared [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: A Holiday Without Dining Reservations

By Erin 13 Comments

The next installment in the Disney Food for Families Column by Erin Foster:

I had the good fortune to be able to spend the week leading up to and including Christmas Day at Walt Disney World. Because I knew this was a high-traffic time of year, I was diligent about making my Advance Dining Reservations the full 180+ days in advance of our trip.

I booked family favorites like the character breakfast at the Crystal Palace and special treats like a holiday dinner at the posh Victoria & Albert’s. Disney geek-and-a-half that I am, I even typed up all our confirmation numbers on a wallet-sized card and laminated it. I had planned for us to eat well. And we did.

Merry Christmas at the Magic Kingdom

We were scheduled to return home the day after Christmas, just as a blizzard was descending upon the East Coast. Needless to say, our flight was canceled. We were stuck at Walt Disney World. You’re feeling sorry for me, I know.

Once we got our accommodation situation settled, my kids started asking me, “Where should we eat?” Since this was now the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, notoriously the busiest week of the year, I assumed [Read more…]

Disney Food for Families: Coping With Fears

By Erin 16 Comments

Kids can be caught off guard by some of the themed elements at Disney restaurants. Erin Foster’s next Disney Food for Families column describes what restaurants might pose a problem and how to cope.

Wooly Mammoth

When my daughter Louisa was four years old, she was already a veteran of several Disney trips. These trips included at least a dozen character meals, dinner at the raucous Whispering Canyon Cafe, and even the foot-stomping Hoop Dee Doo Revue.

She handled all these experiences with kiddie aplomb, so it never occurred to me that we would ever have any problems at Disney restaurants. I was shocked when we got to the Animal Kingdom’s Rainforest Cafe and mid-appetizer, Louisa had a full-on, quivering-lip meltdown.

As it turns out, we had been seated directly next to the life-sized, chest-thumping, screeching, audio-animatronic gorilla. In her preschooler mind’s eye, that gorilla was inches away and effectively alive. She was terrified. My husband ended up getting his meal and hers packed to go; they left the rest of the family and went back to finish eating in the hotel room.

I later learned that, of course, she had company in experiencing sensory overload at the Rainforest Cafe and that there are several other WDW restaurants that have the potential to unsettle [Read more…]

Disney Food For Families: The Fab Four of Kid Food — Pizza, Pasta, Hot Dogs and Chicken Nuggets

By Erin 12 Comments

Disney Food for Families columnist and Disney World Moms Panelist Erin Foster has more great info about kids’ dining in Disney World!

Casey's Corner Hot Dog, Fries, and Fixins

If your family is like mine, then at some point at least one of your children will go through a picky eater phase — where he or she will ONLY eat a certain type of food, texture of food, color of food, or food prepared in a certain way.

Luckily the chefs at Walt Disney World are well acquainted with the picky eater syndrome. They’ve seen it all before and can accommodate most childhood food idiosyncrasies. That’s one of the reasons WDW became such a frequent destination for us; dining out with our fussy daughter was a breeze compared to other vacation spots.

The Fab Four of Kid Food

Some common variations on the picky eater theme are the kids who will only eat pizza, or pasta, hot dogs, or chicken nuggets. While these favorites are, of course, readily available in the parks, they are not all available at [Read more…]

Disney Food For Families: Steal This Idea — Mini Disney Cupcakes at Home

By Erin 18 Comments

The next post from our Disney Food for Families Columnist, Erin Foster, focuses on one of my favorite things: cupcakes! Erin and her daughters did some experimenting to answer a question asked by a reader in a recent comment… . Here we go!

My daughters and I have been long fascinated not only with the taste of the food at Disney restaurants (yum), but also with the incredible presentation of many of the dishes — particularly the desserts. Over the years, we’ve ~~borrowed~~ stolen several Disney dessert presentations and adapted them for our own parties and celebrations. When we saw the recent post here about the new mini cupcakes being sold at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, we knew that this was an idea just begging to be tried at home.

This is the Disney version of the mini cupcake; our goal was to see if we could make these as a sweet treat to bring to some upcoming holiday parties or perhaps give them as a little personal add-on to some [Read more…]

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Disney Food for Families: An Ode to the Sand Bucket