Healthy Heart Valentine's Dinner

When I was young, I remember how excited I would get for every holiday. It seems that we always did something fun for even the smaller holidays. I want to try to continue to traditions for my boys as well. It seems that most of my memories are the fun things we would do with food, or the yummy foods we ate during each holiday. We'd always have green coloured food or a corned beef and cabbage dinner for St. Patrick's day; April Fool's my mom would do something tricky with the food (like put mushrooms in the chocolate cake), etc etc. I guess for Valentine's Day, I mostly remember making cards for people, which we did do this year, but a lot of times it's the fun food that I remember most fondly from each holiday.

So, to continue that tradition, I try to do fun things with food for each holiday as well. If nobody else in my family appreciates, at least I do. This year I did a "Heart" Healthy Valentine's dinner. I made a beetroot, orange and avocado salad, cutting the beet slices into heart shapes using a cookie cutter. I then used the scraps of beet, chopped up in a minestrone soup, with Ciabatta bread on the side. My boys seemed excited about the heart shapes at first, but then didn't want to eat the beets (my eldest used to love beets, now he won't touch them I guess). Oh well, I got excited about it, and thought it was pretty fun.

I also made some heart shaped jammy biscuits. Use any sugar cookie/shortbread type recipe, roll out the dough, and cut out heart shapes. On half of the larger hearts, cut out a smaller heart in the middle, to place on the top. Place about 1 tsp of strawberry jam onto the bottom heart, spread out, leaving about 1/4 inch edge. Then place the top heart over the jam. Bake as directed for the cookie dough you made. I think they turned out great, and I had a lot of fun making them. The boys loved eating them of course.

Happy Valentine's Day.