St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast: Shamrock Eggs with Rainbow Fruit
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a cute, but easy-for-a-weekday-morning breakfast for the whole family. Arrange eggs and toast on a plate along with and a composed fruit salad, then add a little extra Irish symbolism in the form of a “spinach shamrock.”
What you’ll need for each plate:
- eggs
- half an English muffin
- a few spinach leaves
- strawberries
- Clementine wedges
- mango
- green grapes
- blueberries
- red or purple grapes
- a small heart shape cookie cutter and/or kitchen shears
Here’s how you put it together:
We’re going to start by cutting the pieces to make the shamrock. I’m assuming you don’t have a shamrock cookie cutter sitting in a kitchen drawer, but if you do, feel free to use that to cut a shamrock out of a spinach leaf. If that’s you, go ahead and skip this next part.
For the rest of us, there are two other ways to assemble the spinach shamrock. I used a mini heart cutter to cut three shapes from individual spinach leaves.
Spinach is not as easy to cut with a cookie cutter as some other materials. I found that I needed to press down hard with the palm of my hand and really put some weight behind it. Wiggling it back and forth across the cutting board while I was pressing also helped.
I still had trouble getting all the way through with a few of my spinach leaves though (especially over the center stem), so for those I just snipped the uncut part with kitchen shears, using the indentation from the cookie cutter as a guide.
If you don’t have a heart cutter either, you can cut the shapes by hand. Carefully fold a spinach leaf in half, then cut a half heart shape with the shears. I found that the spinach leaves tended to crack a little using this method, but it wasn’t noticeable on the finished plate.
Next, toast half an English muffing and scramble an egg. Put the egg on the muffin, then assemble the hearts to make a shamrock as shown up above. I used a leftover spinach stem for the shamrock stem.
Finally, put a few rows of fruit on the plate to make a rainbow: strawberry, orange, mango, green grape, blueberries, then red grapes. Even better, if you have a bit of extra time before school have your kid arrange the fruit. I made three rows, but you could do more or less depending on your child’s appetite.
Now, I know some of you are reading this right now and thinking, “Are you kidding me? She just told me to buy six kinds of fruit and then used three bites of each one on the plate! This woman is cray-cray.” I get it! That would be craziness. But I’ve got you covered! While you’ve got all that fruit out, use it to make a super quick fruit salad. Chop up a bunch of the strawberries and the rest of the mango, then peel a few more of those clementines and throw them in a bowl. Add a few big handfuls of the grapes and the blueberries and give it a stir.
Voila! Rainbow fruit salad! Pack some of it into a small container and throw it in your kid’s lunch box and now you are the fun mom or dad who makes a St. Patrick’s day breakfast and lunch. Woo hoo! Go you! Plus you have a healthy pre-dinner snack or something to put next to a frozen waffle or a piece of toast at breakfast tomorrow morning.
Or, you can do it the other way around. Instead of buying each type of fruit individually, grab a container of fruit salad from the grocery store deli and pull pieces of fruit out of that to make your rainbow. It will save you a few minutes in the morning and I promise your kids won’t notice if one of the colors is missing from their rainbows.
