I apologize peeps. I got damn near no sleep due to Ms. Hyperdiva staying up until 2am, and it threw my schedule off. In any event, we are going to continue with kid friendly week!

Now, I always like to try out new things, but sometimes, new food sounds yucky to picky eaters. Forget your mouth being in tune for it. If you have a 2-7 year old, you know they go through the picky eater stage.

Mine did too. Top food: fish and seafood.

Now, sometimes, you may have to make two separate dinners or……

Get into the child’s mind.

Ms. Hyperdiva loves loves loves SpongeBob Squarepants. I would say it’s most like an obsession.

We tried the ‘look, mommy is eating it! Yummy’ route, the ‘you will sit until you try it’ route, and the ‘you don’t eat it now, you’ll have it for breakfast’ route. Peeps, I had to get creative. I wanted to try a seafood stuffed shells one night, but knew it was going to happen, until I saw that crazy sponge on the screen, then I got an idea.

I made the stuffed shells with shrimp and crab meat mix with egg and ricotta cheese, and seasonings. The difference, I made it look like it came from ‘under the sea’. Now, my older two didn’t really care to have the same, they were happy with the way I ate mine. All I did was use food coloring for the ricotta cheese, for her serving, and food coloring for her serving of the sauce.

One or two drops of blue food coloring in the cheese/seafood mix, and two or three green food coloring in the white alfredo sauce. You prep as usual, and serve the sauce over the shells, and top with cheddar cheese. I told her it was ‘Krabby Stuffed Shells’.

She ate it like a trooper! Sometimes it’s not the food, it’s the meaning with the food. It wasn’t a lie, because the recipe I got for the shrimp/crab mix was a modified recipe of krabby patties from Nick.com. There were things my kids clearly just won’t eat and sometimes having an awesome creative streak comes in handy.

Funny thing is this dinner was only 30 minutes too. A huge plus I do now, is prepping the meat mix in advance. I do enough of it and freeze it for months. You can measure it out into how many nights you plan to have it, and the same mix can be substituted to make crab cakes, or meat can be substituted, like I did once for a friend, since they were allergic to seafood, I did chicken instead. In any event, it can be pre-made, frozen until you want to use it. You defrost the mix, mix with ricotta cheese, and bake with alfredo sauce or recently, we tried red vodka sauce. I also split the sauce in half baking half with the shells for 20 minutes, and pouring the rest in close to the time it’s almost done with diced tomatoes and peppers.

30 minute gourmet meal, and if you have picky eaters, you can get creative.

Try it and let me know what you think!

Tomorrow: After school snacks: why are you still buying pre made snacks when everything you got is in the house!

~CSM~