Themed Meals

When I became a mother I never dreamed I would be cooking monkeys, claws, and even dinosaur eggs. Oh wait, does that sound odd? Welcome to the world of themed meals. When we have a special event, William has come to expect a themed dinner. Sure, one may expect to make themed Halloween or Christmas treats. In fact, there are entire cookbooks dedicated to such things. But for the every day? It gets a little more challenging.

One of my past efforts include monkey pizzas after a day of playing hookie at the zoo.

Another evening involved a dinosaur meal to wrap up dinosaur week at his day care. We dined on dino claws, spines, legs, and tortillas with lava dip as well as dinosaur eggs.

So the latest effort? We discovered we have a free preview of a movie channel over the next year and one of the movies showing is Planet 51. William didn't think he would be interested so I did what any good mother would do - I bribed him. I told him we could have a fun night with an outer space meal if he would watch the movie. And guess what? He loved the movie and the food too.

But to get to that point, I put on my thinking cap and tried to think about what I had around the house that I needed to use. I somehow fell into a surplus of tortillas so my mind went to UFOs. I cut rounds out of the tortillas, spread a dollop of refried beans in between, and topped with a second tortilla, cheese, black olives, and cherry tomato halves to try an make them look like UFOs. Then I remembered that in my set of cookie cutters I had a mini star in my Christmas set and a mini moon in my Halloween set so I cut stars and moons from potato slices. These were simply roasted with a smidge of salt and Mrs. Dash onion and herb. Love that stuff! And what would any outer space meal be without a few meteorites (or meateorites if you will)? I combined some ground chicken, celery salt, and buffalo sauce to make meatballs then drizzled it with more buffalo sauce for molten meteorites.

So here are the final products:

So what's the lesson here? Some of us dream of having our own show on Food Network or even earning the title of chef. But most of us are every day cooks and when you have kids you learn to be creative. Sometimes you have to so they will eat but the most important reason is because your kids become grown ups in the blink of an eye. Matt tells me I love people through food. This is one way I love my son. We share experiences and the enjoyment of those experiences is reflected in our food. So enjoy your kids and have fun with your food.