When you let your two year old pick out the tin for his lunch, he may pick out a Christmas tin in August. The Santas, snowman, and gingerbread men are covered with food, but I bet you can still see their outlines.

We tried a new breakfast casserole this week with leeks, blueberries, and turkey sausage. It was good. It needed something, but I can’t figure out what. JDaniel also had blueberry muffins he helped make and grapes. He loved it all.

We will continue our breakfast for lunch next week. I can’t decide if it will be french toast or pancakes.

The blog theme this week is Construction Equipment. JDaniel loves playing with his construction vehicles and reading about them I thought it would be fun for him to eat like one.

He was given Frito’s Scoops to scoop up his taco salad lunch. He had ground turkey, shredded cheese, blueberries, peas with barley, and tomatoes to scoop up like a front loader. This wasn’t an easy task. After several attempts with the scoops, he went for using an orange peel grappler (his hand bent into a claw) to finish his lunch.

My blog theme for the week is the 4th of July. I used to celebrate holidays on the week they happened. After thinking about it, it made more sense to share my holiday ideas the week before the holiday. This is JDaniel’s 4th of July tin a week early.

JDaniel has a berry good time dipping blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries into the strawberry yogurt. Why is the cereal there? I started using breakfast cereal as sprinkles on his oatmeal in the morning. Now we have “sprinkles” on yogurt too.

I am part of the Swanson’s Mommy Blogger Challenge. The challenge was to come up with a recipe using Swanson’s canned chicken. I decided to make a try and make chicken salad with a twist. What did I come up with? It is called Fruitful Chicken Salad. My family has been eating a lot of it as I try to tweak the recipe.

JDaniel even ended up with some of the chicken salad in his tin. He also had sunlight peaches, mandarin oranges, and cheese pieces on the top row. Besides the chicken salad, he had goldfish swimming in jello on the bottom. The fish inflated a little as the jello set. I thought they looked icky. He loved them.

Please take a moment to check out the Fruitful Chicken Salad recipe and enter the giveaway I am hosting for cans of Swanson Canned Chicken.

Happy First Day of Summer!

Muffin Tin Monday doesn’t have a theme this week. I decided to create a lunch based on the blog’s theme which is Father’s Day. JDaniel loved the fact he was having a “Dad” lunch.

What is “Dad” lunch? You have chicken breast cut into a D, a cantaloupe A, and a cheddar cheese D in the first row. The second row has peaches set out in a D, an A made of raisins on cottage cheese, and a tortilla D.

JDaniel loves cottage cheese right now and peaches. The other foods are old favorites. I think Dad would have liked this lunch too. He would have wanted the peaches to be fresh though.

 

I decide to do an egg theme. JDaniel doesn’t like eggs. So, I tried to make some of JDaniel’s foods look round like eggs this week. I am not sure I succeeded. He ate grape tomatoes, sweet peas, roundish watermelon, turkey lunchmeat (It comes from a bird that hatched from an egg, leftover stuffed bread that looked speckled like an egg, and roundish sweet potatoes.

This isn’t the best example of this week’s theme. You will have to visit other Muffin Tin Monday Moms to see that. JDaniel did think that this tin was filled with foods exactly the way he likes them.

 

The theme for Muffin Tin Monday is nests and birds. JDaniel’s first nest has a nest of cottage cheese surrounded by peaches. The second nest in raisins in a nest of quinoa salad (see recipe on last Thursday’s post). The third nest is vegetables in a nest of ham. The third nest is ranch dressing in a nest of cucumbers. Only one bird was in the meal. He was toast with shredded Mozzarella cheese.

The first thing JDaniel noticed was that there was an empty cup. He really wanted it filled to start the meal. I suggested he eat the meal and he would get to pick what we filled it with. He agreed with a little sigh.

Oh! If you get a chance, please check out my guest post on Quirky Mama’s blog. It is called Learning at the Grocery Store: Have a Color Hunt.