How to Make Heart Fried Potatoes in 22 Minutes

With Valentine's Day a mere two weeks away, I've been making lots of heart-y crafts with my kids. So it seemed only natural that I would want to make hearty-y food, too.

Here are easy directions for making insane adorable Heart Shaped Fried Potatoes.

1. Go to Pinterest and look at all the insane adorable foods people have carved, kabobed and baked in the shape of hearts and decide you too must do that.

2. Choose to make something with potatoes since you do not have any of the ingredients needed for the other insane adorable ideas, and are too damn lazy to go to the store to get them.

3. Find this amazing recipe for Roasted Potato Hearts and decide to make them for family breakfast.

4. Realize the recipe has too many steps and is way too difficult for someone who only has one iCarly (i.e., 22 minutes) to make the insane adorable heart potatoes and the rest of breakfast.

5. Decide to improvise own almost-as-good heart potato recipe by slicing two potatoes semi-thinly, and then using a cookie cutter to cut out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes.

6. Realize cutting out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes is taking forever (which is way longer than one iCarly episode) and switch to a larger heart shaped cookie cutter.

7. Cut out one insane adorable larger heart potato.

8. Accept that even with this major improvement to the insane adorable heart-cutting out process, it is still going to take longer than you are willing to spend cutting out insane adorable heart potatoes. Especially when you are but one mother with seven remaining minutes, and who still has to make the rest of breakfast.

9. Heat oil in a heavy skillet, and fry the pan-full of insane adorable potato hearts you have managed to cut-out in the preceding fifteen minutes of your life that you are never going to get back.

10. Flip the potato hearts, and serve on platter alongside other regular non-heart breakfast foods.

11. Listen to the kids happily exclaim that there are hearts for breakfast! and decide it really wasn't so much work after all.

12. Vow to make even more and better insane adorable heart food next time!

You can see more insane adorable heart shaped food on my Pinterest Board Heart Food for Valentine's Day.

I've also put all the photos together here, because the other recipes on Pinterest look like this, and I so want to fit-in.

Sukkah in the Suburbs

Our friends up the street made a sukkah for Sukkot - for those of you who are not observant Jews or do not have children attending a Jewish preschool, Sukkot is a Harvest Festival of many customs, including building a little hut (literal translation is "booth") to remember the time spent wandering in the desert all those many years ago.

In addition to building a small, makeshift building in your yard another tradition of the holiday is to eat meals in the Sukkah that celebrate the fall harvest, favorite recipes include butternut quash lasagna, stuffed zucchini, sweet potatoes in orange cups, pumpkin cookies and apple custard pie.

For those observing, Chag Sameach!

Three Great Passover Desserts

Passover will be here on Monday. Which means, I'll be cooking between now and then (even on Shabbos, but shhh about that).

I always make the matzoh ball soup ahead of time, as well as a side dish or two. I also make sure my Passover plates and Seder plate are ready to go. And my tablecloth. Where did my "fancy" one go?

This year for Passover I'm also going to make some desserts ahead of time. Passover desserts used to be the brunt of holiday jokes, but today there are so many yummy options.

In researching Passover for an article on Momtrends, I read about a tradition dating back to the '80s (1980s that is) to add an orange to the Seder Plate to represent groups often left out of mainstream Judaism.

I'm not sure if the purists I celebrate Passover with would be ok with adding an orange to the traditional Seder Plate, so I thought instead I'll sneak it in with an orange-themed dessert. I'm planning to make the Food Networks Chocolate Orange Mousse from the Barefoot Contessa as well as this Passover Orange Sponge Cake:

From DianasDesserts.com

And last, there is always the traditional macaroon for dessert. No recipe is better then Mark Bittman's Ultimate Minimalist Macaroon. Using just five ingredients, these were a treat to make with my daughters using my Mom's secret-stolen recipe:

 

Happy Passover! Do you have a favorite holiday recipe? Please leave a link and share in the comments below!