This post is brought to you by Nature’s Harvest!®. All opinions are my own. Are you as excited about “Finding Dory” as I am? This is one summer movie that I’m definitely not going to miss! To celebrate the upcoming release (just days now!), Nature’s Harvest® challenged me to come up with a cute sea-themed recipe. Now, you guys know I’m not exactly Cordon Bleu material, right? I had all these grand ideas about super cute recipes, like “sea-cucumber sandwiches” and “whale-ific bento boxes.”

The thing is, neither Jake nor I really eat cucumbers and all the fun bento box ideas were already taken. I didn’t want to copy someone else’s idea, and I didn’t want to make something that we’d end up chucking just for the sake of creating a cute recipe. So I started thinking, how about a peanut butter banana sandwich? It’s easy, yummy and pretty healthy. But it can’t just be a boring old PB&B sandwich. That defeats the purpose.

I messed around with a bunch of ideas and finally settled on this very simple PB&B “Black Pearl” sandwich. I was going to call it a sandy-wich, but that’s just going a little overboard, right? Ha! Get it? Overboard?

Peanut Butter Banana Black Pearl Sandwich

Ingredients:

• Your favorite Nature’s Harvest® bread (I used the Butter Wheat)
• Peanut butter
• Banana, sliced thin
• One blueberry

How to Make:

• Toast the bread. While you don’t HAVE to do this, it makes it sturdier and easier to work with.
• Cut out shell shapes using a cookie cutter
• Spread each half with peanut butter
• On one of the shells, add a thin banana slice.
• Use the blueberry as the “black pearl.” I cut mine in half to make it stay. Also because they were originally eyeballs for the recipe below.
• Use a toothpick to hold the other half open, as pictured below.

Take out the toothpick before giving it to your child if they are very young. Jake is old enough to know not to eat the toothpick, and I’m sure you already know to do that, but I like to cover all my bases.

Other fun fish-themed food ideas:

My original actually idea involved a PB&B shell and a jelly whale. I was going to layer banana slices in a fancy scallop pattern. Like most of my recipes, it worked out perfect in my head but not so much in reality. So I gave him eyes! I really liked my little peanut butter shell guy, but seashells don’t have eyeballs, do they? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but still, I thought it came out cute, so here it is.

I also made a jelly whale with banana and blueberry eyes. I kind of love him too, but at the time I didn’t think he was photographing right. So I ate him, then came up with the Black Pearl idea. For the jelly, I used a Strawberry preserve with no added sugar, but you can use pretty much whatever you want.

The overall point that I’m trying to leave you with is this: you don’t have to be a master chef or anything to come up with cute food ideas. Just play around and see what you come up with.

Make a Splash with Whole Grains

From April 28 to July 7, Nature’s Harvest® bread is hosting the Make A Splash with Whole Grains Sweepstakes on its Facebook page, where you can enter for a chance to win weekly prizes, including movie tickets, autographed posters and more. No purchase necessary. See official rules here.

Nature’s Harvest® bread is a great choice for all your fish-themed sandwich recipes because it has at least 8g or more of whole grains per serving. It’s naturally delicious and made without artificial flavors, colors or high fructose corn syrup. While my favorite is the Butter Wheat Made with Whole Grain Bread, it comes in three other varieties:

•   Stone Ground 100% Whole Wheat bread
•   Honey Wheat Made with Whole Grain bread
•   Honey 7 Grain bread

If that’s not reason enough to love Nature’s Harvest, here’s one more: now through 7/15/16 (or while supplies last), you can get a free Limited Edition Dory Ty® Sparkle Eye Beanie Boo™ Dory Plush just by purchasing four specially marked packages of Nature’s Harvest bread. Check out the details here. Isn’t she awesome? Look at those sparkly eyes! I just love her!

Check out Nature’s Harvest® Website for more information on the different varieties as well as nutritional info. Visit them on Facebook to keep up with news! Visit the “Finding Dory” Website for information on where to find tickets and to check out fun games and videos.

Are you planning to see “Finding Dory” with your family? Have you ever made any fun ocean-themed recipes?