Day 2-Valentine Countdown Food theme

Who doesn't love shaped pancakes? Maybe this is more than you needed to see of me, but here I am, years ago, with my own shaped pancake that my Grandmother made for me.
She would make animals shapes, as well as our initials! I just looked back through my pictures (to show you this one here) and it was amazing how many shots I have with my children eating my Grandmother's shaped pancakes (they'd be much cuter to show you but I don't want to plaster their faces all over the Internet). Their whole lives they have gotten to partake in this fun tradition (and thankfully I've been documenting it) that I have enjoyed my whole life as well! For this post, it is about a Valentine pancake, so of course they have to be colored as well as shaped. I color just about any food...and I love it! This is odd to some, but perfectly fun to my children and I. We go through so many boxes of food coloring a year, it's ridiculous. This came about from a time where one of my kids was being a picky eater. She LOVED the color blue. So, out of desperation, I started dying her food blue. It worked like magic (especially if she got to put the food coloring in herself!)! When I made our suckers a bit ago I noticed a funny thing that is quite telling. I have 2 boxes of food coloring. One has all yellow. The other is a new box so it has the usual 4 colors. Can you guess which colors we still use the most? Blue is still the most requested by my daughter. I may get a bit carried away with this as I have to admit that adults that have eaten at my house have asked if I could ever make normal colored food (this comment was just made yesterday, even!). What fun is that? I guess it grosses them out to eat food that is a different color then it is supposed to be.

Back to the main idea here. Pink heart shaped pancakes for breakfast (though we've been known to have them for any meal). I also love adding chocolate chips or sprinkles. Yes, I know they don't need the extra sugar. My rule is that if they choose a chocolate one (I have a daughter who I've done something wrong with because she does not like chocolate-she will choose the plain ones) they can not put syrup on it, too. Whenever I make pancakes I make up a huge batch and refrigerate or even freeze the leftovers. So, we will be having these pink heart ones for a few meals this during our 14 days of Valentine. Another fun thing here is that they are on our "red plate". This is our special plate. We only eat on this for special times. Examples of this are Birthdays, when someone does really well at school or in their sports, job raises, good school grades, great manners or attitude towards one another, etc. This is something my Mom started with us when we were growing up. My kids love the idea so much that they will notice when a sibling is especially helpful and say to me, "Mom don't you think she deserves the "red plate" for that?

And don't forget to scroll down and enter for our first give-away. Just leave a comment and a winner will be chosen on Wednesday!
Rebecca



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Hi all, this is Anjeanette. Rebecca and I thought we would do a food theme today. I have to tell you about our Mom and food coloring. When I was first dating my husband, Mom planned a huge St Patrick's Day meal. Our older sister was down from college and Mom wanted to make it a special meal. I'm sure it would have been a special meal if my sister hadn't come down. But that was the reason Mom gave back then. We had my now husband, over for dinner too. It was his first holiday meal with our family. Mom had made pretty much a Turkey dinner complete with mashed potatoes and all the fixings. The only thing is that everything but the turkey was GREEN! I'm not kidding. We had green apple juice, green mashed potatoes, green gravy, green potato salad. You name it, it was green. My now husband looked at me and asked me if he had to eat it. Of course I told him yes. Everything tasted great aside from the apple juice. For some reason the apple juice just didn't taste right being green.




I just thought that I'd add that little bit to give you even more back story to Rebecca's food coloring info today.




Now on to my portion of today's post...
I am sure that other people do this too, but I thought I'd share anyway. We have major food issues in our house. Food allergies mostly. We don't reward with food and I'm not a big fan of processed food or sweets. I like to make their regular stuff a little fun once in a while. Sometimes I leave notes in my older son's lunch box telling him how great he is or just that I love him. He saves them all in the front pocket of his lunch box. I love that. It is crazy because I didn't realize it for a while. Then one day I was cleaning out his lunch box entirely and found all my little notes saved. Some of them were even on napkins with food smudges.

Wilton has these food markers. Food Markers! How cool is that?! They do would work better on smooth surfaces. The craters in bread makes it a little difficult. But I just draw a picture or something very simple.

The point isn't that you have to make something totally amazingly fancy. The point is to have a little surprise, a little love.

It is a simple thing you can do to make your child smile. I hope that years from now, my kids will remember the love I put into prepairing their lunches.