What We Made for Halloween Dinner
Halloween at our house is always a mix of kid excitement, adults getting excited because the kids are excited, and the last-minute hustle of pulling it all together.
My favorite hack for getting my husband to join in on the family fun? Find the t-shirt version of the costume. Then he's super down, and honestly I respect that, because some men's costumes are a little bit much. This year we were incredibly lucky — we fit perfectly into the Incredibles family!
The funniest part: I told my in-laws about three days before, and they put together their own complementary Incredibles characters. So they were all in on the fun, which means I had to be all in on the food and the theme. And we made it fun, as we always do.
Here's everything we made:
Vampire Blood Punch
Serves 6.
- 3 cups pomegranate juice
- 1 1/2 cups tart cherry juice
- 1 cup apple juice
- 2 cups sparkling water
- Juice of 2 limes
- Handful of blackberries, muddled, plus extra for garnish
- A few sprigs of fresh rosemary
Muddle the blackberries with a rosemary sprig or two in a pitcher. Pour in the pomegranate, tart cherry, and apple juice and the lime juice, stir, then top with the sparkling water right before serving so it stays fizzy. Serve over ice with a blackberry and a rosemary sprig in each glass.
Stuffed Jack-o'-Lanterns
Serves 6.
- 6 large orange bell peppers
- 1 1/2 lbs ground beef
- 1 large yellow onion, diced
- 1 bag (8 oz) shredded cheese, cheddar or Monterey Jack
- Salt and pepper
- Siete taco seasoning, to taste
- Heat the oven to 375°F.
- Cut the tops off the peppers and scoop out the seeds and membranes. Keep the tops.
- Carve a jack-o'-lantern face into the side of each pepper with a small sharp knife. Do this before filling, while they're empty and sturdy.
- Brown the beef and onion in a skillet over medium-high heat, breaking up the meat, about 8 to 10 minutes. Season with salt, pepper, and Siete taco seasoning and drain any extra fat.
- Stir half the cheese into the beef mixture.
- Stand the peppers upright in a baking dish and fill each one with the beef mixture. Top with the rest of the cheese.
- Cover the dish with foil and bake 25 minutes, then uncover and bake 10 more minutes until the peppers are tender and the cheese is melted and bubbly.
- Pop the tops back on like little lids for serving.
Spider Egg Bites
Makes 24.
- 12 eggs
- Mayo
- Dijon mustard
- Salt and pepper
- 1 can sliced black olives
- Place the eggs in a pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, cover, remove from the heat, and let sit 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer to an ice bath, then peel.
- Halve the eggs and scoop the yolks into a bowl. Mash with mayo and a spoonful of Dijon until smooth, then season with salt and pepper.
- Fill each egg white with the yolk mixture.
- For the spiders: place half a black olive on top of each egg as the body, and arrange thin olive slices around it as legs.
Ghost Bananas
- 6 bananas
- Dark chocolate chips
- Peel the bananas and cut each one in half. Stand each half cut-side down so it stands up like a little ghost.
- Melt a small handful of the chocolate chips and dot on two eyes and a mouth with a toothpick, or press mini chocolate chips directly into the banana for the face.
- Serve right away so they don't brown.
I hope you find this blog helpful and make some of this stuff next year. Don't forget to save it!
Love you,
Amanda
Why You Should Never Buy a Crumbl Cookie
Look, I'm all for enjoying treats. But you don't need to spend your hard-earned money on total crap products, and Crumbl is the perfect example of why.
Crumbl Cookie Ingredients Are Trash
First up, the ingredients in these cookies are absolutely wild. Across their menu you'll find things like titanium dioxide, bleached flour, corn syrup, propylene glycol, and artificial dyes. That's not a cookie, that's a chemistry experiment with frosting on top.
The Calories and Sugar Are Horrible Too
Then there's the size of the thing. These cookies run anywhere from 630 to over 1,000 calories each, with 47 to 89 grams of sugar. Their Dubai chocolate brownie alone is 1,010 calories and 84 grams of sugar. You would have to eat 18 Oreos to equal the sugar in that one brownie.
To top it all off, they've been quietly pulling nutrition info from their website. How shady is that? If you can't even check what's in it before you buy it, that tells you all you need to know.
So skip it. Here are the swaps I actually love, and they're just as fun.
Cookie Swaps You'll Love
Shop ALL of my better-for-you cookie picks here.
BAKR
If you want a warm cookie tonight with basically zero effort, grab break-and-bake dough at Target. BAKR makes a frozen brown butter chocolate chip dough (plus s'mores and caramel versions) that bakes up like a real bakery cookie. They're also made with simple ingredients, no weird additives, and you're not paying a premium for a thousand-calorie sugar bomb.
Sweet Loren's
Sweet Loren's is the other Target one I keep stocked — chocolate chunk, pumpkin spice, snickerdoodle, all gluten-free and vegan, and you just break, bake, and eat. Similarly, simple ingredients, real cookie taste, no sugar bomb.
The Gourmet Gift Tier
And if you're looking for more of a gourmet cookie gift, this is where it gets good. Nowhere Bakery and Sweet Addison's both ship nationwide in the US, and they're made with real food ingredients. In fact, these are the ones you send to someone you actually like, or order for yourself when you want a treat that tastes amazing without the ingredient list reading like a warning label.
And all my better-for-you cookie picks live here
That's the whole point. So enjoy the treat, just don't pay top dollar for the worst version of it.
What's Actually in Your Doritos (It's Not on the Label)
You know I flip every package over and read the label. But here's the thing nobody tells you: some of what's in your food isn't on the label at all.
The lab test you might have seen
Consumer Reports recently lab tested 21 popular kids' snacks for contaminants, including something called glycidyl esters. Glycidyl esters are not an ingredient. They form when vegetable oils are refined at very high heat, and in your body they turn into glycidol, which the WHO's cancer agency classifies as probably carcinogenic to humans.
Two chips topped the list. Takis Fuego had 3.41 micrograms per serving, and Doritos Nacho Cheese had 2.85 micrograms in about 11 chips. California's Prop 65 risk level for this chemical is 0.54 micrograms a day. So one serving of Doritos is over 5 times that, and Takis is over 6 times.
Now let me keep this in perspective, because I don't do panic. That California number is a risk benchmark based on eating that amount every day for a lifetime. It's not a legal limit on food, the FDA doesn't cap this stuff in snacks, and the cancer evidence comes from animal studies. Consumer Reports' own advice was basically: serve these rarely.
Fair enough. But here's my honest take: I didn't need a lab test to skip the Doritos.
Why I avoid Doritos anyway
Doritos are about as ultra processed as a chip gets. Around 30 ingredients, including maltodextrin, artificial flavors, artificial dyes like Red 40, and some of the worst oils out there. The label alone was always enough for me. The lab results are just one more reason they're not in my cart.
The chips I actually buy
1. Masa Chips. These are my number one, and it's not close. Organic corn, grass fed beef tallow, and sea salt. That's the whole ingredient list. Three ingredients, real food, amazing crunch.
2. Siete Tortilla Chips. I love the yellow corn ones. They're made with organic corn and you can find them basically everywhere, which matters. Full honesty: Siete's avocado oil is unverified right now, which likely means it may not be 100% avocado oil. But compared to Doritos? Still so much better. A better option doesn't have to be perfect.
3. Graza Chips. These aren't a tortilla chip, they're a potato chip, but they make my list because they're verified made with extra virgin olive oil. If you're a potato chip person, this is your swap.
What's the one chip you can't quit? Tell me in the comments and I'll find you a better swap 😏
Amanda aka MeowMeix
Sources:
Consumer reports contaminants on kids' food.