Spooky FAST meal ideas

I keep having the master plan to make one big, scary meal for dinner one night where everything has a spooky theme. Well, that master plan has yet to fall into place, so in the meantime I decided to do a little hint of spooky whenever I could manage. Isn't that how things usually go, though? For me, at least! LOL I'm always throwing something together at the last minute... and you know what? That's just fine, too.

One night, I think I served sloppy joes ("slop sloppy joes...") and decided to make some instant mashed potatoes to go along with them. Last minute, I remembered something I read in a small Halloween Cookbook from several years ago and I made spooky mashed potato snakes!! I mixed in about eight drops of lime green food coloring (or you could use maybe 6 drops of green and 6 of yellow to get a good shade of green) and spooned my prepared mashed potatoes into a plastic baggie. I snipped the corner with scissors, about 3/4 of an inch, and piped it onto my kids' plates in the shapes of snakes! I made the heads a bit larger and added some cut-up green olives for eyes. If you pull the pimento out of the olives, it's actually like a V shape so it was perfect for a snake's forked tongue! Molly (4) got a big kick out of this meal, but little Ben (1) hesitated to eat it: we joked that he thought it was "real" snake!


Another night I made Mummy Pizzas ~ They were so quick, so easy, and so delicious. I got this recipe from a recent issue of Family Fun Magazine. The actual recipe called for italian bread but I chose a fresh loaf of french bread instead. I cut the loaf into 8 pieces and laid them out on a foil-lined pan, then toasted them for 2 minutes in the oven on low broil. I topped each piece of bread with some pizza sauce (from a jar...) then cut some slices of mozzarella cheese into strips and laid them across each pizza like the strips of cloth on a mummy! For eyes I used some sliced black olives. They look really cool when you overlap a little cheese over them too. Broil your pizzas for about 3 minutes and your Halloween meal is ready.

I was so impressed at the speed of the meal... not only how fast it was to make it but also how quickly it disappeared off my family's plates!! I may not make mummies unless it's October, but I will definitely be adding french bread pizzas to my repertoire of meals.