This year I hit the gingerbread gold for our family!!! The house I got for me from Costco was already built and the frosting was made. Score! Then I found a kit that is made exclusively for Michaels with 4 little houses in it. They are small but perfect for the kids to each decorate and eat. It also came with premade frosting too! Oh, did I mention that mine came with a tree too?
(By the way, I am back!!! I will be posting some new great recipes on this, my much abandoned food blog;)
I am stoked about Brave coming out on June 22nd!!! But more importantly my kids are stoked to so BRAVE Recipes are a fun family activity. My kids love getting into the kitchen with me and these recipes seem very doable. Forming the Scottish Eggs can be messy but fun with the sausage, I recommend possibly getting some disposable gloves;). And the Skink is a great way to introduce your kids to haddock!
This “recipe” is for Mango Yogurt but it would work in essence for any fruit. With Greek yogurt being so high in protein I wanted to find a way to incorporate it into my kids’ lunch time. But I didn’t just want the premade flavors. So I started playing with some flavors and sweeteners to cut some of the tartness.
This is 1 of the recipes when I prep the fruit and let one of the kids do the rest! To make 4 side dish servings (went with peanut butter & jelly;) this is what I used:
Aren’t these cute? The kids were delighted with this little treat and it was just assembly.
Ingredients:
Round Cookies
White icing
Blue Coloring
Yellow Coloring
Mini Twix
Large Marshmallows
Process:
Take any round cookie as a base. Here I am using premade lemon sandwich cookies but homemade would work just as well. Then I took a can of premade white icing (though homemade would have worked) and split it. Some I tinted blue like the sky. And some I tinted yellow like bees. Then I iced the cookie in blue and placed a Twix in the middle. I put the yellow icing in a sandwich bag and cut a small whole in the corner. Then just add 3-5 strips on each Twix. Then cut the marshmallows in half and stick them on the sides of the Twix.
And there you have yummy bees!
The weather heating up around here means 1 thing: berry season!!! That means that the 4lb bin of strawberries were only $3.99!!! So of course we just had to get them! But that was a lot of strawberries at once to eat just plain, even for us. So while I was making my list off of the Vons.com site I decided to look for a great and easy recipe! I have been having a hard time filling up my kids lately and didn’t want a dessert. So I started looking at milk! I mean between the protein and the fact it would be cold, can’t go wrong with that right?
So I found a super easy and not to desserty recipe called B and L’s Strawberry Smoothie. Most of the ingredients are things we keep on hand (an essential point for new and untried recipes in this house) and they were all something I could buy at one store (Safeway)! I also knew that I could substitute local, raw honey for the sugar! I have been looking for more vehicles for raw honey because we all have horrible allergies and eating local, raw honey is supposed to help!
It was going to be a delightful end of the week treat to go with lunch! What can I say, I like to do something a little fun on Fridays when the school work is done. And it was so simple that at least 1 kid could help!
First off we went and stocked up at Vons! We needed yogurt for our smoothies and I needed Greek yogurts for breakfast! And of course we needed strawberries. My kids love grocery shopping with me. But that might be because they bribe them with a cookie;). Seriously, while I might grocery shop for a small army they all really do help and enjoy helping. They even carry everything in and help me put all the bags away.
So when Friday’s lunch time came around I assembled all the ingredients! Kids who were done with homework for the week got to help! The 7 year old got my crushed ice while the 5 year got to cut strawberries for the first time!!! This is the perfect recipe for kids to practice their cutting because the pieces are all going to get blended anyway! So after I assembled all the ingredients, I just blitzed it with my stick blender! And even though it was dessert, I topped it with a little light whipped cream. It made the kids feel extra spoiled! Paired with PB &J, it is a super good for you and filling meal!!!
B and L’s Strawberry Smoothie
(This post’s existence, but not the content, was sponsored. This shop was compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias to celebrate National Dairy Month.)
For the last few years I have made a gingerbread house. But last year I was recovering from surgery and never felt up to doing a gingerbread house so NerdDad suggested that we just have each kid decorate a panel that was then their’s to eat. It was a huge hit so we decided to do it in addition to the gingerbread house I will decorate.
They once again loved it and aren’t they adorable?
I love snickerdoodles! Not only and they yummy, they are a perfect recipe to make with your kids. Even if you don’t have them actually mix up the dough, they can roll the balls to shape them and roll them in cinnamon sugar!
Ingredients:
1 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
cinnamon and sugar (in a 1/2 ratio)
Process:
1. Mix shortening, sugar and eggs. Then blend in the dry ingredients.
2. Roll into balls the size of walnuts and then roll in the mixture of cinnamon and sugar.
3. Bake at 400 degrees for 8-10 minutes.
So this is what we made for the NerdPud’s birthday. These are just cupcakes that were frosted and then cut in half then turned backwards. The middle is a piece of sour licorice. Then the kids decorated them with chocolate covered sunflower seeds.
They loved decorating them and want to do it again!
So I was bored today and wanted to do something different for the kids at lunch. So I went through the frig and came out with some crescent roll dough, pizza sauce, cooked sausage and mozzarella. I thought about those hot dog rolls that I used to see people make and if you can put those into crescent rolls why not pizza? I just layered everything on each triangle and then rolled it up like traditional crescent rolls. It is so easy that next time I will put out different fillings and let all the kids help! I cooked it at 375 degrees for 12 minutes.
Usually lunches around here consist of the ever imaginative peanut butter and jelly. But 1 afternoon, I think I was out of bread, I just threw a bunch of things on the plate. My kids loved it. My guide is a little protein, fruit, veggie and carbohydrate. Here I have our most popular mix. It is baby carrots (with either ketchup or ranch), apple, pastrami lunch meat, havarti cheese, and naan.
