Healthy Halloween Recipes: Festive and Fun Entertaining

For most kids, a big part of Halloween revolves around candy and costumes. For most parents, there is still the concern about nutrition and health. How can you offer some delicious, yet healthy foods to offset the overly sugared treats?

Here are a few ideas for delicious, fun, and healthy Halloween party treats. These will be gobbled up by the kids and parents alike.

Bloody Fingers
A whole new take on "finger" foods. You can find many variations of this recipe on the Internet, but my favorite is pretty simple. Get some refrigerated pizza dough and cover with pizza sauce. Cut pieces of string cheese in half horizontally. Cut a small chunk out of each round end. This spot will be used to place the "fingernail." Place the pieces of string cheese on the dough (far enough away from each other so they won't blend). Heat until the crust is browned and cheese is melted. Slice the pizza around the "fingers" and put a small square of green or red pepper on the tip as a fingernail. It may not sound that exciting, but it really will look like fingers and it tastes awesome.

Popcorn Balls
There are a million varieties of popcorn balls. You can make them salty, sweet, any way you want. Depending on what you use to add flavor, you can make them delicious and relatively healthy snacks.

Slimy Nose Burrito
This is a fun recipe and very simple to do. It uses simple burrito ingredients, like meat, beans, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, and guacamole, but adds a new twist. When you make the burrito, fold the right and left sides over as normal. Then fold the bottom third of the burrito under itself to make it stand up and look like a nose. Slice out two little holes for nostrils and smash a little the ingredients out. This is fun for the kids. Depending on which ingredients they choose, the "stuff" that comes out could look like snot or slime. Gross, but fun. You can refer to the ingredients as mucus, snot, whatever gross and humorous things you can come up with.

Bumps on a Log
An old favorite. Fill celery slices with peanut butter or cheese. Top with raisins, Raisinets, grapes, or other ingredient that looks like a bug (or otherwise something you wouldn't normally want to eat). A healthy and fun snack that the kids can help make.

Mummy Dogs
By simply making Pigs in a Blanket with hot dogs and dough, you can refer to these little treats as wrapped up mummies to go along with your Halloween theme.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds with Olive Oil
It's Halloween, so you likely have some pumpkins around anyway. You can also buy pumpkin seeds in a bag from the store. Roast or toast them with some olive oil for a healthy and nutty snack. You can also top a salad with some cheese and pumpkin seeds, another delicious and healthy option.

Spooky Sandwiches
Dress up a simple sandwich made with peanut butter, lunch meat, or cheese by cutting the sandwiches into fun Halloween shapes. All you need is some Halloween shaped cookie cutters.