MyPlate's birthday is tomorrow. How will you celebrate? Today we're going to look at some fun features of MyPlate...

MyPlate's birthday is here! It was exactly one year ago today that the USDA released its new food icon. How are you going to celebrate MyPlate's birthday?

This delicious barbecue dinner incorporates a chicken fajita theme with the addition of peppers, onions and spicy seasonings for the kabobs. The veggies roast right along with the skewers so you have a great tasting dinner without the heat and mess in your kitchen. And this is a MyPlate meal so you have all the nutrients you need in the calories allotted!

MyPlate is celebrating its first birthday on June 2, 2012. Join the celebration with this fantastic fruit cheesecake that features MyPlate's great design.

Here are many ways to use a plate for portion control. After all, size matters. What you put on the plate matters. Using a plate to visualize how much you are eating is a great idea. We like to think of a plate as a reverse piggy bank. The smaller it is, the more you save!!

Our latest MyPlate creation is great for the heart! Barley, salmon, walnuts, vegetables, olive oil and more are made into a quick 30-minute meal that you will want to serve over and over again. Enjoy!

Our trip through the food hall at the annual Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo was full of learning opportunities. In this post, we review the top 33 things that we picked up on our visit. We even found a general rule of thumb for most displays and marketing efforts. These elements were neat, engaging, and beautiful, and the focus was on the flavor of food, with a few nutrient benefits sprinkled in for marketing. Marketing efforts extolled offers of more nutrients for fewer calories in many of the featured products.

Here are 12 things we learned about MyPlate after working with it all week. We read through the pages of the USDA choosemyplate.gov site, performed makeovers on over 8 meals, and created a comprehensive MyPlate PowerPoint presentation that has over 70 slides. We like the new plate quite a lot and were amazed that it even works with fast food.