I Love Making Dinner . . . Fun!

  Maybe it's not how it really use to be, but I never remember dinner being boring when I was a kid. I do remember when we would sit down as a family and make a list of all of our favorite dinners, and that's what was always on the menu for the week. As an adult, I now do the same thing. Every Sunday Ryan and I sit down and go over what we liked about the week before, what we didn't like and what recipes we'd like to switch out. Then we go through the fridge and pantry and see if we've got everything we need for the week, and if not it goes on the grocery list. We then run over to the store and get the few ingredients we need and when we get home I spend the next hour or so prepping ahead everything I can for the week. Dicing and chopping up veggies, browning and portioning off meat and sometimes even preparing full meals that can just be thrown into the oven on the day we need it.

  Now that we've got a few extra people staying with us, it's even more important to say on top of it, or we end up making last minute bad decisions for meals. And now that one of the people staying with us is 9 years old, it's especially important to make dinner a fun experience so that he'll actually eat it! The biggest test came yesterday when I had decided to make meatloaf for dinner. But we couldn't do ordinary meatloaf, cause that's not fun, so I made up a batch of Meatloaf Cupcakes! And if it's any indication as to how much the 9 year old loved them, he made up a song about them (which is still stuck in my head)!

  I followed a very basic recipe:

1 1/2 pounds ground beef 1 egg 1 onion, chopped 1 cup dried bread crumbs 1 teaspoon oregano salt and pepper to taste

sauce: 2 tablespoons brown sugar 2 tablespoons prepared mustard 1/3 cup ketchup oven at 350. cook for 10 minutes, remove and cover with sauce, then back into the oven for 5 more minutes and that's it!!

  Then I sectioned it off into about 1/2 cup portions and put them into a cupcake tin (sprayed with olive oil). But that isn't the end of the fun, because what are meatloaf cupcakes without frosting! Yep, I made up a quick easy batch of baby red mashed potatoes and used a ziplock bag to pipe the "frosting" unto each little cupcake! I added a quick side of green beans and dinner was complete. And EVERYONE loved it!! For the adults, we even had chive "sprinkles", and for the 9 year old (my nephew) I had him stick a green bean out the top of the mashed potato frosting and make it look like a candle! It was a fun, simple, delicious and healthy dinner for the family. And one that we will definitely be adding to the list of our favorite meals to make again!