Halloween Party!

So we hosted a pre-trick-or-treating Halloween party for a whole bunch of neighborhood kids & parents last night!  We had pizza, veggies, fruit, and these:
mummy hot dogs & octopus hot dogs and jack-o-lantern clementines.  I also made a very tasty fall sangria for the grown-ups.  I LOVE Halloween and I'm sorry to see it go for another year.  I guess we're moving on to Thanksgiving and holiday baking...not a bad trade!

Halloween Lunch

Nursery school halloween lunch for my littlest guy.  He does better (ie: eats more) with his turkey sandwich cubed, so his hand-cut cheese lays on top.  His Frankenstein-style surprise ghost is a banana with raisin face, "bolted" into & hiding in its own peel...maybe next time I'll do a mummy locked inside a banana peel coffin.  Hmmm....

Halloween Lunch

Another halloween lunch.  Cookie cutter turkey sandwich.  I got lazy and used the triangles from kid#2's jack-o-lantern cheese as the ghost's face.  They really should have been circles.  The monster mouth is an apple cut to hinge open and look like teeth.  I've seen people do this online by shoving nuts into the apple for teeth, but my guys are both in nut-free schools, so hand cutting it is!  The tongue is a cut red grape.  Vanilla yogurt with raisin face made the spooky treat at the bottom.

Halloween Dinner: Chicken Pot Pie

The kids helped with this one.  I made our usual recipe of chicken pot pie, but rather than crusting up the top of the iron skillet and throwing it in the oven, we transferred to individual ramekin dishes.  The boys used ghost & pumpkin cookie cutters to make fun Halloween shapes in the dough.  We placed the dough on top of the ramekins and baked in the oven.

Halloween Dinner: Creepy Octopus Hot Dogs

Using the cut & boil technique you see in the Japanese bento boxes, I made little octopus hot dogs for little man, and big ones with long tentacles for my big boy.  We always use nitrate & nitrite free hot dogs.

Halloween lunches: pumpkins & ghosts

We ran out of bread, so I used a bun for the sandwich.  Turkey sandwich cut to ghost shape with raisins embedded as spooky face.  Night scene made with stars & moon cheese shapes.  Jack-o-lanterns are a Little Cutie orange, peeled & halved.  The faces are made from seaweed snack cut with scissors.  The spooky tree is broken pretzel & seaweed snack.  This lunch came back eaten to the last crumb.

This turkey sandwich is cut to a pumpkin shape with cheese as the face details.  The Little Cutie is halved and peeled away from the skin.  I cut the jack-o-lantern faces into the peel and then replaced it over the fruit again.

Halloween Breakfast: Witch Pancakes

Using squeezy bottles with pancake batter, I build the pancake picture backwards by making details, letting it cook over low heat for a while to create a contrasting color, then filling in the rest.  Flip and finish cooking.  I added chocolate chips for eyes at the end after flipping.  Placing the chips on top makes it melt a bit just from the heat of the finished pancake.  These creepy witches are great for Halloween.

Halloween Dinner

Using refridgerated pizza dough from the grocery store (yes, making your own is "easy" but extra work), we made ghost shaped pizzas with olives & mini meatballs (made for dinner earlier in the week) for the spooky faces.  Big hit with the boys!  Plus, we got a school lunch out of it too!

Here is the lunch I packed.  Ghost pizza and an orange bell pepper cut to look like a jack-o-lantern: