Dinner of the Week: Birthday Pancakes

In our house, birthdays are a pretty big deal.  Life is for celebrating and one way we keep the celebration going all week long is with birthday dinners.  We allow the birthday kid to plan their week's worth of favorite meals.  While this may seem slightly indulgent, it's actually pretty genius because it gives me one free week of NOT planning meals!  

Our littlest guy turned 5 last week and he took his time carefully planning out every meal.  While I had to tweak a few meals (so we wouldn't have pizza every night!), we ended up with a pretty well-rounded assortment.

His favorite night turned out to be "Breakfast for dinner" night.  This kiddo is our "Front-loader."  He consumes pretty much all of his calories in his breakfast alone.  It is not unusual for him to have 3 breakfasts before he heads out the door to school each day.  I used to try to control his consumption, but then realized if I did, he wouldn't eat the rest of the day.  He just doesn't want to take the time to stop and eat when he could be playing!  Sure, we coax him with string cheese and veggies dipped in hummus or ranch, but getting him to eat a full meal is pretty near impossible.  

For his breakfast dinner he chose Strawberry and pecan pancakes with a side of bacon and yogurt parfaits.

 My husband is the pancake wizard in our house.  He swears by a "secret recipe" (although we're pretty sure he just found it off of Pinterest one random day).  He had the honor of cooking up the pancakes while I sliced up some strawberrys and chopped the pecans.  Normally I would bake my own granola (it's so easy and SO much more tasty) but we were short on time this week, so store-bought granola was what we used.  We cook the bacon in the oven because not only does it come out perfect every time, but I don't have to stand over a hot griddle or deal with a stinky/greasy house the rest of the day!  (Check out how on this Pinterest site: Oven Baked Bacon ).

I always at least try to squeeze some veggies into the meal, and it turned out that peppers is what we had in the fridge, so a platter of multi-colored peppers is what we did!

Here are more of our Birthday Boy's 
Favorite meals that we ate this week:

Monday:  Chuck-E-Cheeses Pizza 

Tuesday:  Breakfast for dinner!  Strawberry and Pecan pancakes, yogurt parfaits, and bacon

Wednesday:  Cheese tortellini and cucumber stars

Thursday:   Chicken fingers, Krinkle cut french fries, and mini salads

Friday:  Hot dogs, chips, and a veggie platter