Last weekend my kids announced that they were “sick” of my usual beach picnic meals. Well, now. I was surprised. I was a little indignant. But truth be told, I’m a little tired of those meals, too.

Shake your meals up - try something unfamiliar

I decided to shake up our dinner plans and try something different - essentially appetizers for dinner. Wasn’t that in a movie once?

I figured that with several appetizer-sized dishes, we’d probably would get a pretty good balance of food stuffs. After looking around the kitchen and glancing through some cookbooks, I came up with the following menu of appetizers:

• Hummus* with carrot, celery, and pepper sticks
• Tortilla chips with guacamole and salsa
• Caprese salad skewers*
• Baby swiss with Melba toast

It may not seem like much, but it really was fine. It was plenty.

The perfect solution to a dining rut

I also decided to be loose about the meal and let the kids just pick and choose over the course of the evening. I watched closely, though, and was pleasantly surprised that they really ate better than I expected. They ate more vegetables, not too much in the chips and crackers department, plenty of protein from the hummus and a bit of dairy in the cheese. Not bad. We still had blueberry pie for dessert, though. That certainly counts toward the fruit total for the day, doesn’t it?

While I wouldn’t want to do this every night, it was a good solution to our beach picnic rut, and it was a lot of fun.

Hummus

2 cans chickpeas, drained
4 cloves garlic, minced (more or less to taste)
1/3 sesame tahini
Juice of one lemon (more to taste
Olive oil

Place chickpeas, garlic, tahini, and lemon juice in a food processor. Puree until smooth, adding a tablespoon or two of the olive oil to help it along.

Serve with celery sticks, carrot sticks, pepper sticks and virtually any other raw vegetable.

Caprese salad skewers

Mini balls of mozzarella
Grape tomatoes
Fresh basil leaves
Cocktail skewers or long toothpicks
Balsamic vinegar

Skewer one ball of cheese, one basil leaf and one tomato on each skewer or toothpick and place on plate. Drizzle with just a touch of balsamic vinegar.

PointsandPrizes.com Keyword: TAHINI worth 50 points good through 08/25/08.
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