Valentine's Day Breakfast

I don't know if you know or have children who don't like to eat very many fruits and vegetable but I have two. They will eat a few fruits and one won't eat any vegetables. So I'm always trying to come up with ways to sneak them in. This morning I decided we'd have pancakes. Now usually I add applesauce, pureed pumpkin, sweet potatoes or fruits. When my son stopped eating baby food like peaches and pears, I used that so it wouldn't go to waste. Today I decided to try something different.



I had just bought some Strawberry Banana V8 Fusion to see if my son would drink it. My daughter loves pink so I thought, "I wonder if they'd eat pink pancakes." I use Krusteaz pancake mix so all I have to add is water. So today instead of water I used the V8 juice. They both seemed to like it and my daughter loved that they were pink. Then I thought, "These would be an easy Valentine's Day breakfast, especially if you shape them in hearts." You could also used pureed strawberries for this.

If you aren't very good at creating shapes with pancake batter one solution is to take a squeeze bottle (I bought one at Walmart and cut the tip some to make the hole bigger) and put the batter in there. It makes it easier to create different shapes because you can control how much and how fast it comes out much easier. I used this method when my daughter stopped eating pancakes. I started with a Mickey Mouse shape and moved on to hearts, flowers, smiley faces, guitars, dogs, and basically anything she likes to try to get her to eat them. It worked. She loved the shapes. Now she doesn't mind if they are round so I do shapes on special occasions. Others have suggested reusing sqeezable ketchup bottles. This didn't work for me.

Also, some brands end up clumpier than others so they may not work very well in the squeeze bottle. Mine tends to get clogged using the Krusteaz brand. Another tip is to NOT fill the bottle all the way. If you fill it to high, it may cause the lid to pop off or overflow out of the hole as it sits in the bottle.