Food

My weekends are packed with running errands, taking the kids to swim lessons, trying to fit in some fitness, and all the other mundane tasks that have to happen on the weekends. It’s really hard to fit it all in, but my goals for 2017 is to focus on my health and fitness.

Easter is a little over a month away. Now that my kids are a little older, I’m going to put a little more effort in to making it fun for them. I already started thinking about ways I could decorate, like with this little Easter Bunny candy jar. Last year, I found a bunch of creative uses for PEEPs. This year, I’m searching for cute Easter desserts recipes to try.

My kids are picky when it comes to their proteins. Luckily, they will eat turkey meatballs. Since it’s National Meatball Day on March 9th, I thought it would be fun to come up with a recipe utilizing the Cooked Perfect Meatballs my kids already love. This meatball French bread pizza is a perfect appetizer or dinner. It is super easy to make and it’s ultra-tasty.

Ever since coming home from Italy, I’ve been searching for more ways to connect with my roots. Creating traditional Italian dishes is one of the ways I honor my family heritage. Although I absolutely love eggplant parmesan, the standard recipe is really heavy and not very healthy. So, I decided to create a lighter eggplant parmesan recipe that still tastes decadent but it’s secretly healthy.

When we lived in Kansas, we hosted a small dinner party for my husband’s law school friends. One of our guests brought this giant apple-shaped cheese ball appetizer and I thought it was the cutest thing ever. At first, I had no idea what it was.

I’ve seen a lot of great baked oatmeal recipes online but I never made it myself. I love the idea of baked oatmeal because it’s a perfect hot breakfast you can make it in advance and then eat it all week long. Plus, I love baked goods. This blueberry baked oatmeal is a healthy way to get the taste of a baked good, like a blueberry muffin, without all the sugar and calories.

One of my 2017 goals was to generally eat healthier, especially fitting in more servings of produce every day. I’ve found that making a smoothie bowl recipe is a super quick and easy way to get more produce into my diet.

How are you spending this Valentine’s day? We are planning a simple date-night at home. I will make my hubby a nice homemade meal and dessert so we can enjoy some time together over a nice meal. When it comes to desserts, I like them sweet, but I also like a little salty flavor thrown in. It’s so hard to choose just one flavor, so I combined them and made these chocolate chip cookie popcorn bars.

One of my absolute favorite foods is my husband’s homemade pizza. After much trial and error, he has perfected it. We’ve never tried a BBQ chicken pizza before, so we thought it would be a fun way to use our stand-by skillet pizza dough recipe.