I'm a Sappy Valentine food nerd

Okay I get a little sappy (silly + happy) when it comes to holiday food. I really enjoy Valentine's day meals. Trying to come up with pink/red/heart-shaped food. It's just fun!

I always do a special breakfast for the kids on Valentine's day. It's usually a school day so they come down to the counter to find fancy dishes set out and a little valentine gift from me, something small and inexpensive but just for them. kind of like these pictures from a couple years ago... look at my baby! Still in a high chair....

Really it's more presentation than gourmet food....

That year it was 2 kinds of jiffy muffins, canned pineapple and home canned grape juice.

But fancy glasses, heart straws, powdered sugared plates, heart notes stuck into their muffins....

a little treat.... They love it and talk it up in the days leading up to valentine's just to make sure I don't do something crazy and FORGET to fancy up breakfast!

This year being Saturday and having Carly's friend staying with us while her parents were out of town, I felt a little more pressure to make it sensational....

I set the real table and Mark was in on it this year. We went shopping together for ingredients for yogurt parfaits.

strawberry yogurt

Vanilla yogurt

strawberries

kiwi

bananas

granola (my favorite: Post Honey bunches of oats "just bunches")

and I made cinnamon rolls from a recipe that gave instructions for making them the night before, putting them tightly covered in the fridge and being able to just pull them out of the fridge and put them right into the oven to bake. They turned out great and that sure made it easy.

My table looked like this:

Thanks to Mark for the lovely red and white roses....

Look Amy... I actually sewed my table runner.

I didn't have enough matching glass bowls or glass plates so I did some mix and matching. Some got ice cream glasses like this and some got glass bowls for their yogurt parfaits and I put the plates on top of their bowls/glasses which all had inside a chocolate peeps marshmallow bear.

I bought strawberry marshmallows on a whim and then didn't know what to use them for. On the back of the package were instructions on how to make flowers from simply cutting the marshmallows with kitchen shears in slices. I think they turned out cute and the strawberry marshmallows... YUM!

Since it was Saturday Mark wanted to make sure we DID something other than just hang out and watch TV all day.
I know you're wondering if I typed that right. Yes. Mark said that!!!!!
We had a game day bonanza. We played Phase 10, curses, Sorry & Memory.
Sorry was the big hit and was played MANY MANY MANY times by small groups and large.

Dinner was a less formal affair than breakfast. I just got it ready about 5ish and people sauntered in and fixed a plate when they felt like it. I made pink rice, heartshaped BBQ meatpatties, broccoli and a strawberry-pineapple jello dish
(I just can't call it a salad. It's just not right)

I forgot to take a picture of the finished plate but this is how my "sappy" heart-shaped meat patties turned out.


Raw

Cooked.

I know... Sappy. But fun!