“Now he wasn’t hungry any more- and he wasn’t a little caterpillar any more. ”
This week’s 52 weeks of cooking theme was Boards, which immediately made me think of board books and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Now there’s a book character who would go to town on a charcuterie board, and only regret it at the very end.
Inspired by this hungry little guy, I made a charcuterie board of all his favorite foods.
The book
It’s been a long while since I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so I needed a refresher on everything he eats. It’s a lot of food, but a surprisingly balanced diet.
One apple
Two pears
Three plums
Four strawberries
Five oranges
One piece of chocolate cake
One ice cream cone
One pickle
One slice of Swiss cheese
One slice of salami
One lollipop
One piece of cherry pie
One sausage
One cupcake
One slice of watermelon
A leaf
The meal
I constructed the caterpillar at the center of the board out of the fruits that he eats during the week: apples, pears, nectarines (I couldn’t find plums), strawberries and oranges.
For his antennae, and to represent lollipops in the feast, I made blueberry tanghulu, a candied fruit snack popular in northern China. It reminded me of candied apples.
To represent the chocolate cake and cupcakes, I made Texas sheet cake bites. These were a semi-fail, as a good portion of them stuck to the mini muffin pan or fell apart when I tried to take them out. But I managed to salvage about a dozen for frosting.
For the cherry pie, I used phyllo cups to make tartlets filled with brie and cherry jam. I also used the phyllo cups to make ice cream tartlets, filled with hot fudge and mint-chocolate chip ice cream.
I made my own fridge pickles and arranged salami, cut sausage, watermelon and cheese slices around the rest of the platter.
And for the leaf, I used some spinach that needed to be eaten to make spinach feta dip.
My fiance helped me arrange it all on the platter — it took the two of us to make it all fit — but our end product was a feast fit for a very hungry caterpillar.
Next week: Most Requested