Celebrating with Fondue at Home for Family Celebrations

I find the whole idea of making fondue fascinating. My first experience actually tasting fondue was at The Melting Pot restaurant on Mom’s Night Out a couple months ago. We had so much fun! I started doing research, because as much as I would love to share fondue with my family, I don’t think I could afford to take all eight of us to The Melting Pot.

As I started looking into it, I found out that my sister does fondue with her family every year on Christmas Eve. What a fun tradition! I wanted to come up with a fondue family tradition myself, share the tasty fondue foods with my kids, and learn to make fondue at home.

As it turns out, January 4th is National Fondue Day. We made fondue today for the first time! I started by ordering a fondue cookbook called Dip Into Something Different from The Melting Pot, and purchasing three fondue pots – one for cheese, one for broth, and one for chocolate. Then I went to the store for cheese, chocolate, FRE (alcohol-free wine), shrimp, chicken, broth, the rest of the recipe ingredients and some bread, chips, and veggies for dipping. Once I got home, I enlisted some help to start getting everything cut into chunks.

Once we had everything ready to go, it was time to make fondue. Tonight for supper, I set up the cheese fondues first – a swiss cheese fondue and a cheddar fondue with bread and tortilla chips for dipping. And grapes. Certain children dipped grapes in their cheese. I followed the recipes found in The Melting Pot cookbook I referenced earlier. Once everyone had their fill of cheese and bread, we switched to meat.

I set up a broth pot on another counter, and let the older kids cook their own meat – timing it for 3 minutes per set. My oldest daughter and I cooked the meat for the little kids. Although I think they would be fine, the timing was off for us because I had to take a child to guitar lesson and couldn’t be right there supervising, so Clara took over. We did the shrimp last so that those precious children who do not like seafood didn’t have to taste it on their chicken.

Finally, we finished off with a pot of white chocolate and a pot of milk chocolate with bananas, marshmallows, strawberries, and grapes for dipping. Next time I plan to also get some shortbread cookies or graham crackers or pound cake. Bananas are the best though!

I’ve made this little collection of recipe links and fondue tools and accessories to share with you, just in case you would also like to enjoy fondue for family celebrations at home. You can do it!