Spooky Halloween Meals for a Children's Party
- Children love sandwiches. A little creativity and the proper tools can create specialty sandwiches for a Halloween party. Playing with shapes works with cold sandwiches. Use Halloween cookie cutters to shape sandwiches, just as if you were cutting cookie dough into shapes. Some companies produce special branding irons used for grilling. Some have Halloween styles, including pumpkins. A grilled cheese or other hot sandwich would work with such a branding iron.
- Classic chili can become bug stew. Use the largest kidney beans available. Dried ones tend to have more crunch to the tooth, making them more like bugs. Add some black beans to the mix as another type of bug. Rather than a red-tomato-based chili look, adding some cocoa powder will add flavor, and also give it a bit of brown, dirt-like cast. Use spider- or other bug-shaped cookie cutters to cut out cheese to place on top.
- A lot of how children perceive food comes from how it's presented. Use colored pasta -- green and red are common and will work well -- in place of standard spaghetti. Break it before preparing into non-uniform lengths. With this presentation a standard spaghetti sauce becomes blood sauce -- add a little red food coloring to give more color if needed -- and meatballs can be eyeballs. Adding some tomato and cheese to the meatballs before cooking will change the texture and look spooky enough to help sell the illusion.
- Meals are more than just main dishes. Gummy bugs make creepy snacks. Any type of fruit punch can become spooky by adding eyeball ice cubes -- as long as kids are old enough not to try to eat them. Make ice cubes from alternate colored juice in spooky Halloween trays for younger kids. Cups of chocolate pudding with a cookie tombstone and a grave made of green icing become graveyard treats.