Kid-Pleasing Weeknight Menu

Our family has had a bad habit of not eating our evening meal together regularly.  In large part, this is due to the fact that last school year I taught piano lessons three nights a week and the lesson times overlapped with mealtime.  I HATED that we were not regularly eating together.  This year, I'll only be teaching two nights a week though.  Over the last part of the summer I tried hard to get back into the habit of planning out our menus and making sure we sat down to eat together.  I think this is such an important thing to do as a family.

I've had fun planning our menu and trying new recipes from the many I've pinned on Pinterest.  This week I came up with a menu that was a hit with both my sons.  (Important sidenote:  My oldest son is picky about a few things, but willing to try most foods.  He's pretty easy to feed in general.  My youngest son is picky about many things and is hard to feed in general.)  Finding a meal that appealed greatly to both of them was really an accomplishment.  The best part is that these two recipes are super easy to throw together quickly.

I made pancake bites or pancake dippers (half with and half without turkey sausage) and breakfast potato bites.  Links to the recipes for both of these dishes are in the previous sentence; just hover over the name of the recipe to get the hyperlink.  I pretty much made each recipe exactly as written.  I had read the reviews of the potato bites and saw that several people had trouble getting theirs to turn out crispy.  I did not have this problem at all.  I used store-brand frozen shredded hash brown potatoes (only half the bag) and 3 eggs, as suggested in the recipe.  I was able to make 12 potato bites in full-size muffin tins.  They were really good with salsa on top.  The pancake bites were made in a mini-muffin tin.  I used my Pampered Chef cookie scoop to schlop the batter into the holes, which made it very easy, and not messy at all.

We gave each person an individual cup of pancake syrup for dipping (this was one of the best parts of the meal for the boys) and also had a bowl of salsa on the table for the potato bites.  Super yummy stuff!!  I highly recommend this recipe combo.  We also had fresh apple slices on the side, but I was thinking a fruit salad with berries, bananas, and peaches would have been a perfect accompaniment.