Healthy movie nights

I've been hesitant to post about our movie nights because I don't want to start getting wrapped up in clicks and views and pins and all that.

BUT, I've realized that I can maybe help other families out by posting some of our movie night menus. See, I'm a huge fan of the fun of theming movie night dinners. But eating healthy at home is super important to our family, and I've struggled to find ideas that work.

For us, eating healthy on movie night looks like:

• Appropriate ratios of vegetables, fruit, protein, and whole grains (when possible)
• Trying new foods
• Limiting high-fat foods
• Limiting sugar
• No food dye

Here are some of our recent menus. I hope these help your family!

FINDING NEMO

Bottom left: roasted asparagus seaweed with French onion whole-wheat linguine anemone

Top left: nitrate-free hot dog octopi and Swiss cheese shark teeth

Top right: apple crab (I cut holes and stuck raisins in for eyes), orange fish

Bottom right: sea turtle frittata (I used cucumber -- a chunk off the end, quartered, for the head, and slices cut in half for the feet). Those sea turtles were The. Cutest. Ever.

This dessert was inspired by these Squirt desserts. I wanted to cut down the sugar and food dye, so I used fudge stripe cookies, mini Nilla wafers, marshmallows, chocolate chips (I had regular sized but you should probably use minis!), and chocolate icing to hold it all together. OK, they're not QUITE as cute, but I felt a heck of a lot better feeding this to my 3-year-old!

TINKER BELL

Fruit fairy wands! Yeah, I know they don't have wands, but whatever. These are so much fun to make and super healthy. I had these plastic dowels from an Edible Arrangements bouquet, but any long, fairly strong skewer will work. I topped each with a slice of star fruit (which, side note, took FOREVER but was super adorable). We used blueberries (for Silvermist), strawberries (Rosetta), bananas (Fawn), blackberries (Vidia), kiwi (Tinkerbell), and peaches (Iridessa). 

I didn't get a good picture of the rest of the food, but we made peanut butter and jelly butterfly wings (cut a slice of bread in half, spread with peanut butter, and let kids decorate with jelly to look like a butterfly), and a flower made out of tomatoes and basil.

 CARS

  

I never knew I had so many things in my kitchen that could cut circles! 

• Top left: Mack-a-roni (I bought Annie's Organic, but I probably should have gone with the wheel pasta to be extra cool)
• Bottom left: Lightning McDogs on Historic Route Asparagus (nitrate-free hot dogs with cucumber wheels and cherry eyes, on a road made from asparagus). I would do these with hoagie-style sandwiches, but we had two hot dogs left we needed to eat up!
• Top right: Fillmore's stoplights (a slice of cheddar cheese, cut in half, with circles of tomato, banana, and celery. I cut the end off cherry tomatoes, then used the middle of my apple slicer to make the circles with banana and celery).
• Bottom right: Mater's Taters (using this recipe for seasoned crash potatoes. You will never cook baby potatoes any other way ever again. These are heaven.
• Top middle: Luigi and Guido's tire brownies (using a biscuit cutter and the end of a funnel to make the tires).