Maybe you’re just not into going out for Valentine’s Day. It can be expensive—fancy food, fancy clothes, a babysitter… Or maybe you’d just like to celebrate your love as a family. You’ve got more than one love in your life when you’ve got kids, right?
Last year, I decided to surprise ALL my boys with a little family Valentine’s dinner. It was so much fun and WAY too easy not to share it with y’all.
The menu was simple: pizza and a salad.
I started with the salad prep. My guys are picky eaters, so our salads usually consist of baby spinach and some fruit and possibly nuts for my husband. (I might get a little crazy and add goat cheese or gorgonzola to mine—watch out!) To stick with the Valentine’s theme, I chose red strawberries…and sliced them in such a way that they looked like hearts. Simple, right?
Next up, I rolled out the pizza dough and cut it into heart shapes. I made my own from a quick dough recipe from a friend, but Trader Joe’s and Lazarolli both have great quality crusts that you can easily pick up and are not too expensive. (Lazarolli’s crust does come frozen and needs time to defrost!)
We like to par-bake our crusts to keep them from getting soggy. Once all this was completed, I set the table with the salads, some table scatter and heart necklaces for each family member that I’d picked up from the dollar store, and flowers from the grocery.
Not pictured are the strawberry crush gin fizzes I made for my husband and myself and the similarly inspired mocktail (made instead with sparkling grape juice—which you can catch a glimpse of in the photo below) that I had waiting for our older boy when they got home. Once they got there, it was time to start saucing and topping those pizzas!
I had even cut the kiddo’s pepperoni into little heart shapes… I like to think he was impressed. Mostly he was probably just excited about the pepperoni pizza. It was pretty easy to do—I folded the pepperoni in half and then trimmed them using kitchen shears.
The adult version included a few more toppings (i.e. veggies):
Little bit even got his own mini cheese pizzas and a tray full of heart-shaped strawberries:
A “love”-ly time was had by all! Go forth and create heart-shaped, family fun! This makes a great surprise that you can easily pull off in an afternoon or a fun family event if you want to get the kids involved!
