Welcome back, adventurers! This week on the menu: Bambi. Not literally. Just the food eaten in the movie Bambi. You may be thinking, what food? Did you really go eat what the animals ate? I will answer with a resounding yes. Grass tastes disgusting. However, there were some perks, and it was an adventure just figuring out how to make grass and red clover desirable. Or edible.

The back story: Bambi is the son of the Prince of the Forest. He's affectionately called "little prince" by all the forest animals. There's even a wise and grumpy old owl. As Bambi grows he makes friends with a rabbit named Thumper, and a skunk called Flower. The movie is adorable. Watching Bambi learn to walk melts your heart. Hearing him learn words makes you giggle. It's all jolly good fun for the first half of the movie. Then the humans come. They bring guns…and poor Bambi loses his mother. The winter continues and Bambi and friends start to grow up. Then in spring they all find female friends and become twitterpated. The humans are seen in the forest again, and this time it catches fire. The animals have to run for their lives. After coming back into safety, the circle ends with Bambi's gal having twin fawns and all is happy. My personal note about the movie is the art work is beautiful, and the music is stunning. Comparable to Fantasia in that regard.

Shall we move onto the food? One of the opening scenes starts with birds eating berries. By the look, those berries were either snow berries (poisonous to humans) or red currants. We opted to eat the red currants. They are tart! They are also delicious. The flavor of them mixes well with other foods, so they accented our meal quite nicely. The next scene is squirrels eating acorns. Humans can actually eat acorns, but they must be soaked in warm water first to draw out all of the toxins. Unfortunately we couldn't get any acorns, so we had to leave them out of our meal. After that more birds are shown to be eating what looks like grapes. At this point, I'm excited. I love berries and grapes! There was more to come, however.

Bambi and the deer eat grass, so we got some wheatgrass at the store (think Jamba Juice). In the wintertime, the deer are hungry and start stripping bark from a pine tree. Pine bark is also edible, in fact. You have to get the inner bark though, the white stuff protected within. To make it edible for humans, it can be boiled or fried. At this point I was less encouraged. Moving on to the scene where Thumper is eating red clovers. The greens make for long ears and great big feet (but they sure are awful to eat). The only way we could find clover was dried.

So how did this all come together? We decided to make a salad. Throwing grass, fried bark, clover sprouts, currants (dried and fresh), and grapes in with lettuce covered most of the stuff. With the dried red clover we made the dressing. We boiled the clover, strained it, and mixed the water with some olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, some lemon juice, and honey. All-in-all, it wasn't horrible. At least now I know I can survive in the wild if need be. It was hard to get the red clover dressing to taste right. It was hard making the grass and bark desirable. In fact, I'm not sure we succeeded at all, but it sure was fun!

For you health-nuts who love this kind of stuff, the Bambi meal may be a treat. Currants dried or fresh are yummy. I'm always up for grapes. The grass tasted like grass, and on a side note is great to have in the winter when your dog has an upset stomach. The bark kind of turned into a powder in my mouth. Boiled red clover is even worse than the dried stuff. However, overall I prefer Pinocchio and Snow White type meals.

If you're just joining in, you can visit disneymeals.wordpress.com for more info about making meals from the Disney movies. It's been a great adventure so far!