Halloween Easy Fun Food for Kids; Make a Pizza Pep-o-Lantern

Halloween is a fun time for kids but often the decorations and food preparation are not easy enough for them to take an active part. Easy, yet fun to make, Halloween foods can make the holiday even more fun for your kids. Carving a jack-o-lantern isn't easy enough for little kids and winds up being a Halloween project mostly done by the parent. Consider carving Halloween pep-o-lanterns with your kids for an easy, fun food project this year. Pep-o-lanterns are fun to make, and are easy enough for even a small child to work with their own pepper.

You can make your Halloween Pep-o-Lantern with any type of stuffing you want. You can use a standard pepper stuffing (the ground beef and rice recipes you easily find by a quick Internet search). Or you can make them even more fun for the kids by making Pizza Pep-o-Lanterns. A Halloween Pizza Pep-o-Lantern is an easy, fun, kid's Halloween project. Each child can choose the pizza fillings they like since each pepper is done individually. Here are the steps to making Pizza Pep-o-Lanterns.

Gather your Pepper Lantern Ingredients:

You will need one pepper per person. The tall thin ones work better for more face carving space. You may want to select different colors of peppers for variety among the kids. It's easier to identify whose pepper it is with different colors. Before brining the kids into the project, cut the tops out of the pepper, scoop out the seeds and rinse then out.

For the Pepper Lantern stuffing you can use any kind of cooked rice. To make this project easy on myself as well as the kids, I tossed in two of the boil in bag rice to cook while we worked on carving peppers. Each bag has two cups of rice and should do two peppers (1 cup per pepper). When you start the rice, also turn on the oven to preheat to 350 degrees F.

Other items needed:

1 Jar of pizza quick

Any pizza toppings your kids like. Toppings should be chopped up before starting

1 string cheese per pepper

1 small can of tomato paste

1 Glass baking dish

1 box Toothpicks

Carving easy fun food Pep-o-lantern:

Step one of the Easy Fun Food project is to gather the kids around the table and give each a pepper and a toothpick. Using the toothpick they can either punch holes in the shape of eyes, mouth etc, or they can draw a line for them pushing the toothpick into the pepper. If you press hard enough it cuts through the pepper and when the eye is complete you can just push the piece into the pepper and easily remove it. Smaller kids may need help getting their face parts removed from the pepper.

While the kids are carving faces, remove the rice from the stove, drain and dump in a bowl. Mix with the pizza sauce for a saucy rice stuffing.

Mixing the Lantern Stuffing:

When the kids have finished their carvings, give each a bowl containing one cup of the saucy rice. Allow them to choose their pizza toppings. Pepperoni, sausage, and pineapple all make good additions to the rice. Each kid adds their choice to their bowl of rice and stirs it all up.

Stuffing the Pep-o-Lantern:

Take one string cheese and place standing up inside each pepper. Each kid can then add their rice by the spoonful into the cavity of the pepper, around the cheese stick. Sometimes you have to push the rice down from the top to reach to the lower parts of the pepper and completely fill the pep-o-lantern.

When each kid has stuffed their lantern, you can use a medicine dropped to add more tomato sauce coming out of the eyes, nose, and mouth if your child is into the gory side of Halloween.

Pep-o-Lantern Baking:

Stand the peppers in the glass baking dish in a pool of blood (tomato sauce). Cover the dish with a loose foil cover to keep them from browning to much, and bake for 25 minutes. Depending on the thickness of your pepper, you may need to bake longer if you will be eating the pepper itself. The string cheese which extends above the pepper will melt and cover the top rice to keep it from being hard. If you do not use the cheese you should place the top that was removed from the pepper over the rice as a cover while baking.

Halloween Pizza Pep-o-lanterns are an easy, fun food activity for kids to do. My children are older now but still love to do these each year. If you need an easy but fun carving project that you can also use as a meal, grab a pepper and get to carving.