A Teeny-Tiny Summer Dinner That Your Kids Will Love!

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Hooray for barbecue season! My boys love hamburgers (and I love playing with food) so, for fun, we had a TINY bbq dinner with miniature burgers, hot dogs, teensy baked potatoes and wild blueberry mini tarts. (The burger looks large in this photo but was quite small.) My sister-in-law, Kat, suggested the idea a few years ago and we had so much fun with it that we did it again. Trader Joe’s (not a sponsor of this post) sells these little hamburger/slider buns. We’ve also used Martin’s Famous mini potato rolls. Small dinner rolls are another option. You can also get mini hot dogs at Trader Joe's. Cut the hamburger rolls in half for mini hot dog buns.
Mini baked potatoes: Trader Joe's sells mesh bags of tiny potatoes. We roasted them whole and my sister-in-law sliced them open and gave them a little squeeze to fluff them open. She even topped them tiny pats of butter (easier to cut when the butter is very cold).

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I loved coming up with topping ideas. Here are a few: 

  • lettuce- use the tiny inside leaves of romaine hearts  
  • tomatoes- sliced small cherry tomatoes 
  • pickles- sliced cornichons 
  • onions- sliced shallot, which looks like mini red onion! (or use the inside of an onion)
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Dessert: we grow tiny wild blueberries so I had to work those into the meal in the form of mini tarts.

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I made mini “tart tins” by cutting down foil cupcake liners. Use scissors to cut them down so the edges are about a 1/2”.  Use a cookie cutter (or a juice glass) to cut circles of dough that will fit in the tart tins. You can use your favorite pie crust recipe or a prepared pie crust. Prick them with a fork so they don’t puff up and pre-bake for a few minutes or until they turn lightly golden. 

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For the filling I cooked down some of the blueberries with sugar and then added some corn starch to thicken it.  (As I often do, I made this up on the fly so I’m sorry I don’t have a real recipe for this. But you can’t go wrong with pie crust, blueberries and sugar, right?) I spooned some of the blueberry filling onto the crust and topped them with a cookie cutter-cut-out of pie crust and put them back in the oven until that seemed cooked, around 15 minutes and topped with uncooked blueberries. You can try this recipe for mini blueberry tarts.

Happy summer! I hope you'll try this with your family and comment with any big (tiny) ideas that you come up with!