Fun Finger Foods

Tonight we had a dinner that was so well received by the under-four crowd in our house, that I want to jot for future inspiration!

We've had a lot of favorites in the last couple days - chicken-broccoli and yummy tacos - so I really didn't feel like doing much cooking tonight.

So, while John took the kids to the playground to play, I whipped up some mini-bagel pizzas (mini bagels, jarred sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese - easy peasy).

I wanted to serve a veggie with it and decided some edamame (in the shells of course - so much more fun to eat when you have to pop the beans out of their shells!) would be great.

I know the kids love edamame but the bagel pizzas were new (you'd think pizza would be an easy sell but Lily is quite particular about the sauce the cheese ratio and the amount of "spicy-ness" that works for her) so I thought I'd put out a couple of sure things like a bowl of olives (fun to slip onto all of your fingers) and peanut butter with pretzel sticks for dipping!

The theme on the table this week has been Matchbox Cars so it just all came together really nicely to be a super fun and easy meal.

Half-way through the meal, Lily started using a little dump truck to dump edamame shells in the shell bowl, and Quinn was bulldozing some olives around the table.

I think there was a time that I would have thought toys at the table and finger foods were not good for dinner, especially not Sunday Dinner, but tonight was one of the most relaxing and fun meals we've had in a long time!

And no one was jumping up from the table after five minutes to run off and play. I think this was one of the longest meals that both kids contently ate and played at the table!

And there was very little kitchen clean up after we ate since there wasn't a whole lot of mixing and cooking involved -- which is always a hit with the over-30 crowd in our house! ;-)