Tic Tac Turkey Bacon

Last week, I made this creation for my kids' weekend breakfast.

A friend of mine who has a food blog posted a picture of a woven slab of bacon on Facebook and I decided I could build on that and make it more fun for my boys.

1. Take out 3 pieces of bacon per person and slice them in half. I am making 2 of the final product, so I need 6 pieces. I use turkey bacon. My sons don't really seem to know the difference, yet.

2. I line up 3 of the half-pieces like this on my Pampered Chef Large Bar Pan. I'm sure you can do this on a regular cookie sheet or in a skillet, you would need to really reduce the baking time, though.

3. Then I begin to weave the pieces to form a mat. 

4. Then I put my bar pan in a cold oven and turn it on at 400F. My oven takes 10 minutes to reach that temperature. Once it reaches 400, I bake for an additional 20 minutes. 

5. While it is baking, I prepare the toast Xs. After toasting a piece of wheat bread, I remove the crusts and cut it into 12 squares. I then cut each of these squares into an X shape. My kids will eat the crusts and pieces, but you could easily food process the pieces for breadcrumbs.

Depending on the size of your piece of bread, you need 4-5 Xs per serving. I'm sure you could do this with cheese, if you don't eat bread. 

6. I then cut grape tomatoes into 4 slices. You need 4-5 slices per serving and I don't usually use the end pieces on the final product, but my 4-year old will eat them on the side.

7. I serve it on a slab of toast. 

8. I put the cooked bacon slab on top of the toast.

9. I then add the toast Xs and the tomato Os.

Yes, I know their plates are orange and blue. My Florida Gators have their last regular season basketball game at Kentucky this afternoon. Go Gators!

10. Serve to some very happy children with fruit.

Eating like an animal

I know it's been a while. I've been busy training for my Ragnar race and teaching my anatomy class for kids at the community college. I am going to start a new little feature about the weird breakfasts we have been eating in our house.

Wednesday, Squirty woke up and told me he wanted breakfast like a monkey. I asked if he wanted it to look like a monkey or to be what a monkey eats. The answer was "eats." I've taken it to be a little bit of an ecology lesson. Squirty told me that monkeys eat nuts and seeds. In general, primates tend to be herbivorous, but do eat eggs, insects, etc.

This was my least creative day. I gave the boys part of a granola bar, a banana, blueberries, and yogurt (that was for Milk Dud).

I've never seen either child eat so quickly.

This was somewhere around 10 minutes later.

Considering neither one has really been a good breakfast eater, I decided to make a trend of this. I asked Squirty what he wanted to be tomorrow. "A lion! Roar!" Great.... he made it difficult on me. I felt like I was on that episode of Top Chef: All Stars where they gave one team the choice of carnivore or omnivore.

Here is what I decided, with a little help from my husband: Wart hog (bacon), ostrich (turkey breast), and ostrich eggs (lions DO scavenge a bit... Chip suggested a poached egg).

Gone, just as quickly, and followed by a huge cup of orange yogurt.

For today, Squirty requested to be a bird. Well, that is pretty easy. I gave them some more seed/nut granola bars, some fruit, a poached "robin" egg (some birds eat other bird's eggs), and "worms" (spaghetti I cooked in water with red food coloring).

Eggs were not consumed, but the rest was GONE.

Tomorrow, we are going to eat like a bear. I will continue this until we get bored with it. I think it is a great way to teach a curious child about how different animals eat different diets.