Spooky Snacks 👻

wholesome, easy ways to make snacks a bit more fun

We aren’t big into Halloween, and especially not the dark/creepy aspect, but I always love when a few tweaks here or there can make a normal snack or dish—even a healthy one!—a little bit more fun and appetizing for kids. Here are some ideas!

P.S. I know I said I'd only send out one email a week and this is already the third, but…I figured you’d want to be notified of this one 😉

Jack-O-Lantern Stuffed Peppers

This is a very easy dinner and you can customize it however you want.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cut the top off an orange or yellow bell pepper, take the seeds out, then cut out two triangles and a jagged smile, and you’ve got a Jack-O-Lantern. Fill it with whatever you want—maybe sauté beans, corn, and ground beef with Mexican seasonings and stir in shredded cheese to hold everything together—and bake for maybe 20 minutes. It really doesn’t matter how long because everything is fully cooked already. The tops will probably fall off, so no need to try to keep those together, until the end.

Cut-Out Apples, Cheese and Tortilla Chips

If you have seasonal cookie cutters, there are lots of ways to utilize them! This 3-pack from Target is only $3. Believe it or not, we found apples to be the easiest to work with.

For the tortilla chips, toss them in oil and salt, then bake them in an oven at around 350 for maybe 12-15 minutes? These were a huge hit.

Encourage the kids to not be wasteful with the parts that don’t make the cut! You could roll the leftover pieces together and market it to the family as “monster mash” or something. We used the tortilla leftovers to make more chips, in funny random shapes!

Spider Web Whipped Cream

Squeeze a big circle of whipped cream onto a plate or on top of another dessert. Then, make a very simple ganache—melt some chocolate chips with butter or heavy cream in about equal parts—and put it in a Ziploc; snip a tiny corner off the bag, and squeeze concentric circles onto the whipped cream, with a bullseye in the middle. Give your kids skewers or tooth picks to drag from the middle to the edge, and boom! You’ve got a tasty spider web. You can dip fruit into it or just eat it with a spoon 😉

Jack-O-Lantern Burgers

Make burgers or sliders. While the meat is cooking, cut circles of cheese and cut out two triangles and a toothy grin. It’s easy, I promise. Save the leftover cheese and put it on top of the bottom bun. When the burgers have been flipped for the last time, place your cheese circles on top.

Here’s what the prepped plates looked like. I hurriedly made eight of these while the burgers cooked; it was intense 😅

Spooky Drinks

Before you pour the drinks, take a dry-erase marker and draw a face on your glass.

Frankenstein: Blend together mango (could be frozen) + spinach + water or OJ
Ghost: Milk
Jack-O-Lantern: Orange juice

Bonus: Booberries

Yes, we’re stealing the name of the cereal, but who cares? Just call blueberries “booberries” and it’s instantly a little more special.

I hope you have fun with these ideas! Shoutout to Pinterest for being a wealth of fun ideas; I tried to pick the easiest/healthiest/least gruesome here 😉

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts