Yah yah yah... I know Halloween is SO last week, but you didn't think I'd let it pass without sharing some spooky lunch ideas, did ya? I actually intended to post this last week, but you know how life goes...I'll fill you in on all the drama in the next post. If you follow me on Instagram, you already know I was busy crafting Halloween lunches for the two weeks leading up to Halloween, but for those of you who don't, I'm recaping my favorites in this post.
As you can see from the photos, I had a lot of fun making lunches for Halloween. I tried to plan ahead and mostly focused on the colors of the food and my trusty silicone muffin cups to keep things looking Halloween-y. I also have a small stash of 1" cookie cutters that make quick work of slicing foods into pumpkins, bats & cats.
You'll notice some little toys and props in some of the lunches...I collect stuff like that as I find it and hoarde it in a rarely used stock pot in the back of my kitchen cabinet...then I raid my stash when I want to add a little treat.
You'll also notice that I was a wee bit obsessed with eyeballs this year. Somewhere along the way I saw some cute bento picks with goofy little eyes, but they were like $6 plus $8 shipping...not gonna happen. I made my own with plastic cocktail pics, google eyes and my hot glue gun. Easy Peasy.
So let's look at the lunches! This was a monster inspired lunch...the colors were inspired by the little finger puppet. I got the idea for the apple monster mouths and the ham tongue from the geniuses on Pinterest.
This lunch is all about the eyes and vibrant Halloween colors. We were testing mozzarella during this time, which is not SCD-legal, but made excellent eyeballs. The eyes were inspired by this post, which uses straws to cut the little circles. I didn't have any straws on hand, so I used the end of a tiny funnel to punch a little circle in the cheese and then cut matching black circles out of black olives. After that, it was easy to pop out a circle of cheese and replace it with the black olive. You can easily do this with any SCD legal cheese, or other ingredients for that matter. Colorful produce made it all really pop. (Side note: The mozzarella test was not successful...caused stomach pains and lethargy.)
This was my attempt at a "starry night at the pumpkin patch" scene. It features a variety of foods in traditional Halloween colors of black, orange, green and yellow. The star fruit is naturally shaped like a star, so that was fun to play with. We also started testing rice crackers along with the mozzarella cheese, so that is what is shown under the bat cheese. Rice crackers are not SCD-legal, but my daughter tolerates rice well and hasn't had any trouble with them.
Here is another monster puppet inspired lunch. I made the eyeball skewers with 3" plastic cocktail picks and giant googley eyes. On the eyeball skewers, I speared little waffle sammie bites which are basically a ham and cheese sandwich made on waffles and then cut into little squares. Yummy!
This is the lunch I made for Mummy Day at school. (You can read my sob story about Mummy day and get the recipe for the Grain-Free Mummy Cookie you see in this lunch here.) The yellow mummy-ish things in the top left are carrots with a little melted cheese...I got the idea off Pinterest (shocker!) but they were stupid. They were fiddly to make and my daughter didn't eat them, so don't waste your time on those. The mummy apple was another Pinterest idea, but the mummy brie bite was all mine...LOL.
More eyeballs! And a Frankenstein rubber duck...that glows in the dark and swims in applesauce! I made the egg eyes using the same technique as the cheese eyes and then sprinkled a little paprika around to make them look bloodshot. The green stuff in the top left is mashed avocado with a bit of lemon juice and a sprinkle of salt.
Sorry for the poor quality of this photo...not sure what happened. This lunch is all about traditional Halloween icons with a brie ghost, provolone bats and cheddar pumpkins. The eyes & mouth on the brie are black olives and the pumpkin leaves are basil, which for some reason my daughter loves to eat.
Back at it with the eye balls in this one...these are the tiny eye ball picks I made...only about an inch long. The skeleton hand was part of a pack of 4 hair clips that I got out of the dollar bin at the drug store. I popped the clips off, gave them a good wash and voila! I love hands coming out of the food!!
This lunch was my ode to vampires. I used 3" eye ball pics that I made with pink eyes...whoooo ooooo. I borrowed my color scheme from the little vampire duck...primarily black, white, red and pink with a smidge of green. The pomegranate seeds are supposed to be drops of blood. ;)
This lunch is all about the creepy crawlies...spider rings with the rings snipped off and a plastic cockroach up the creep factor of an otherwise pretty normal looking lunch.
Here is where I totally started to lose steam...running out of ideas! I had intended for this skeleton lunch to be much more black and white, but I didn't plan ahead and didn't really have enough to fill it, soooo...it became a hodge podge, with a skeleton finger puppet and some bone-shaped food thrown in for good measure...LOL. The little treat in the cupcake liner is a peppermint-patty-ish treat that I made to have for post-trick-or-treating...these turned out AWESOME. Will definitely be sharing this recipe soon because it will be perfect for the holidays too.
And, last, but not least, a zombie lunch on Halloween day to go with my little one's zombie Katy Perry Halloween costume...LOL. The zombie finger puppet inspired the colors of black, green, pink and red. I saved up all the gross looking food I could including the moldy-looking sage derby cheese with green veins running through it, some guac and spinach feta chicken sausage. You'll recognize the skeleton hand from a few lunches back.
That's all folks! I hope you enjoyed this post and found some ideas you can use to jazz up your lunches. As you can see, it's really pretty fun to play with your food! I won't lie though, I'm happy to be moving on from Halloween. Time to come up with some fun ideas for turkey day. ;)
If you want more information about my lunches and the lunchbox I use, check out my Planetbox Lunchbox Review and my tips for How To Pack SCD Lunches Kids Can't Resist.
Thanks for stopping by! XOXO, Cindi
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