Girls' 4th Birthday Party #1: FELT LASAGNA!

Posted by Ethne~

I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT!  My munchkins KD and Easy Mac turned 4 on October 3^rd.  Of course, never being one to miss a party, I have 2 weekends full of them.  The first, this past weekend, involved 2 shindigs.

Saturday, we had my brother- and sister-in-law, Rich and Mel, over for dinner, along with Mel’s parents J and W.  A great time was had by all.  First and foremost, the kiddos had a great time.  We made lasagna and ate ice cream cones (theirs had a candle of course).  Mel and W brought W’s ‘famous fruit salad’, a salad with baby grape tomatoes from J and W’s garden, fresh salsa and garlic bread!  Talk about nice guests!  I must expound upon two things:  J’s tomatoes were OUT OF THIS WORLD.  Let me tell you that homegrown tomatoes are better than anything you can buy at the store.  And our hometown (Lori, Mel and I are from the same hometown) in northwest ND is a prime location for growing tomatoes.  Who knew?

The other AMAZING treat at the party was for adults only.  W has chocolate shots made at their local grocery store and brings them for all holidays and events.  Super dalish.  Basically, it’s dark or white chocolate shells (mini size) filled with Irish crème liqueur.  W was generous with the shots and let me tell you, WOMS, Mel and I plan to make or buy our own chocolate shot molds before the holidays.  We will tell all y’all how to do it because no WOM should miss out.

Rich partied it up with the munchkins but left most of the chocolate shots to us.  He was carbo-loading up on the lasagna since he ran the Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday.  Insane, I know.  We are super proud of him, but most of all, I tell him on a constant basis how ridiculous it is to run 26.2 miles if you’re not being chased.  Mel, W and I decided that we probably wouldn’t even run that far if we were being chased.

All this being said, I worked my tail off to make the girls a fun felt food gift for the Saturday affair, but wasn’t able to pull it off in time.  I had already kicked butt on the felt birthday cakes, but we would be giving those to KD, Easy Mac and Super A on Sunday. I’ll still tell you about the felt lasagna now though since Sunday’s post is all about the felt cake!

So here’s what I did for the felt lasagna (I’ll tell you about the felt soup later):

I found one of the girls’ play kitchen pans (more like a play baking sheet instead of a casserole dish, but they won’t know the difference) and took measurements from there.  The lasagna was made to fit this pan.  You would just do the same with your chosen pan measurements.

Play cookie sheet

I made a rounded rectangle of the red felt and cut up bits of brown felt to be the ground beef.  These bits were glued on with my favorite fabric glue FabriTac.  It’s a little like rubber cement, but it seems to dry fastest and work the best (not perfect, but pretty darn good).

Burger bits

The next layer was ricotta cheese and spinach leaves.  How do you make ricotta cheese?  This was a good question and I was about to leave it off entirely until I decided that if I sewed spinach leaves onto a white rectangle, it would work for both layers.  I did a free-hand cut-out (6 of them) of green felt baby spinach leaves, then sewed them onto the white felt.  I stitched (by machine) closely around the edges of the spinach leaves, then stitched up the middle at a few angles to look like veins of a leaf.  You can get the gist from the picture.  I think this turned out to be the cutest layer.  I used lime green thread to be a nice contrast to the dark green leaves.

It's a sew-down!

Cute huh?

I made two layers of lasagna noodles.  Basically, I took the same width as the red sauce rectangle and added about 4-5 inches extra to the length on ivory-colored felt.  I pinned gathers at even increments until the length of the lasagna was the same as my pan.  I sewed on both ends and a couple times in the middle of the noodle layer to keep the gathers in place.

Pinned layers

Curvy felt pasta

Finally, I took scraps of ivory felt and sewed bits of them together into 6 piles, all at various angles, to be my the mozzarella cheese the girls could sprinkle on the top.  ADORABLE!

I basically just sewed a square around the layers

I have not actually been served felt lasagna yet, but I’m just awaitin’.  It would be a great Leap Year idea to ‘eat’ felt lasagna rather than the carb-filled real version.  A real calorie-saver!

Wanna try some?  0 Weight Watchers Points

All the layers - assemble in whatever fashion you'd like!

Oh, and in case you want a THRIFTY breakdown, the cost for my felt lasagna was:

Brown felt: $0.34 (lots leftover)

Red felt: $Free b/c I already had lots of

Ivory felt: $Free b/c I already had lots of

White felt: $0.34 (a little leftover)

Dark Green felt: $0.34 (half-sheet leftover)

Basically, each piece of felt at JoAnn’s costs $0.34 and you can buy value packs for $3.99 which have basic colors in about 15 sheets.  More food to come!

Have a great Friday everyone!