In honor of Veteran’s Day on Thursday JDaniel had an American flag lunch. I guess it should be called a silicone tray lunch this week rather than a muffin tin.

The tray contained a breadstick cut into fourths, the tops, and bottoms of meatballs (The centerpieces were removed and used in my lunch.), daps of tomato sauce for dipping, and apple stars. I usually do a better job of balancing JDaniel’s lunches with veggies and much less meat. After the fact, I thought cherry tomatoes or grapes would have been better than so many meatballs.

I will do better next week when the theme is the food pyramid.

I tried to make a spider web with sour cream, but I  couldn’t make a fine enough line. After three attempts I laid some whole wheat spaghetti on the nachos and prayed that people looking at it would think it was a web.

The second challenge as trying to make the muffins look like spiders. I thought using green peppers would look okay and be a healthy thing for JDaniel to eat. He loved the muffins along with the turkey and cheese inside. The olives disappeared quickly. The green pepper legs were handed to me with the suggestion that I might like to eat them. JDaniel thought the muffins looked like spiders. My husband wanted to know why JDaniel was eating cats. Aren’t cats a Halloween symbol? Is there a spider cat? Do they really look like cats?

The third and final challenge was trying to get JDaniel to try wearing the spider rings. He won’t wear bugs on his fingers he told me.

The carrots and apple weren’t a challenge. Thank goodness they went over with JDaniel. I was done with challenges for the day.

The theme for Muffin Tin Monday is pumpkins this week. I have been brainstorming for about a week to come up with ideas for this tin.

• Idea One: I found this idea for the pumpkin fruit salad and knew it was right up JDaniel’s alley.
• Idea Two: I could make grilled cheese sandwiches and carve a face in the bread. After the first cut I realized that this was not going to work. The cheese was cemented to the bread. The sandwiches still ended up in the tin minus the cute faces I planned to put in them.
• Idea Three: There are tons of great recipes that have pumpkin in them. I could try one of them and put it in the tin. There were no cans of pumpkin on the shelves at the two stores I went to.

• Idea Four: Take something and make it look like a pumpkin. I took several peach slices and put them in a pumpkin shaped array. A raisin was placed on the top of them to look like a stem.

• Idea Five: Place something orange in the tin and call it a day. I found some carrots in the fridge and added them to the tin with a cup of ranch dressing to dip them in.