Explore Other Cultures as a Family with Dinner and a Movie

One of most interesting ways to explore geography is through culture. Cultures around the world can be so fascinating! 

What better way of learning about a culture than through their traditional foods? My family really enjoys preparing and sampling various cultural foods on what we call international night. We choose a country (usually by spinning a globe and letting a child stick their finger on it), search for traditional recipes of the area, and select the ones we think we can cook, and we would like to try. 

Our culture nights evolved out of my desire to try new recipes, and my husband jokingly suggesting we watch Cool Runnings with our Jamaican Chicken recipe. We went all out and made a whole meal to go with our movie and even invited some friends to share. Since then we have continued through various countries with the same friends, and we have found some recipes that we surprisingly liked a lot and have even added them to our regular rotation. Most recently, we visited France. 

Seems like from the beginning my daughter has always wanted to "visit" France. Now she really does want to visit France, but that isn't in the cards just yet, so this was the next best thing. 

We even had these cute Parisian paper products from Jasper and Emerald to enjoy with our French food. The only thing better than delicious food is NOT doing the dishes afterward! 

To go with our fun dinnerware, I grabbed my daughter's pink Eiffel Tower for table decor. 

Our French menu included Coq au Vin, mashed potatoes, a baguette with butter, and a green salad. 

Now, I have to admit I was a little concerned with the plates being overcome by the sauciness of the chicken.  It wasn't! These are some thick paper plates to be sure. No food accidents at all even with all the littles carrying food to the living room to watch the movie we selected, April and the Extraordinary World. Other fun, kid-friendly, options would be A Monster in Paris or Ratatouille. 

Of course, you can't have a French dinner without dessert! We went with crepes since they are relatively easy to make; after all we are not French chefs. 

Filled with whipped cream or Nutella and fruit, they were definitely a delicious end to the meal. 

Another thing I like to do with my own kids either before or after culture night is to again, locate the country on the map and read a little about the culture in that country. It is always fascinating to see how similar and different various cultures are from our own normal. 

A couple books I like to use for this are Children Just Like Me and Here and There. 

I can't wait to see which culture we will visit next. We haven't "visited" Britain yet, maybe we will head there, so we can use the London themed dinnerware from Jasper and Emerald, or maybe we will just blindly stick our finger on the map! Either way, it is sure to be delicious!