Sharon Stroud Stops By The Cooking Corner

Healthy eating coach Sharon Stroud has four delicious and easy-to-make recipes just in time for Halloween.

Hummus With Carrot Witch Fingers

Ingredients

1 container of hummus, flavor of your choice

Extra veggies for dipping

5 long carrots, peeled

5 sliced almonds

1. Put hummus in a bowl for dipping.

2. For the carrots: trim according to the typical length of fingers and a thumb.

3. Cut tip of each carrot to be slightly rounded.

4. Use a dab of hummus to glue a sliced almond fingernail to the top of each carrot tip.

5. Stick fingers in the dip.

6. Serve with a plate of cut fresh veggies such as carrots, celery, daikon radish, jicama, red bell pepper, and red radishes.

Tangerine Pumpkins and Banana Ghosts

Ingredients

Tangerines or Cuties, peeled

Celery, cut into small sticks

Bananas, peeled and cut in half

Mini chocolate chips (I like Enjoy Life)

1. Stick celery into tops of tangerines.

2. Stick chocolate chips into bananas.

3. Can’t beat that for quick and easy and delicious too!

Apple Mummies

Ingredients

1 apple, Honeycrisp or Pink Lady

4 mini chocolate chips

1. Cut apple in half vertically and carefully remove the core.

2. Start at one edge, use a vegetable peeler to remove haphazard strips of apple peel.

3. Lay each apple half on a plate or serving tray and press two eyes (the pointy ends) into the apple in an area where the peel has been removed.

4. Some apples (such as Granny Smith) tend to brown more quickly than others after they have been cut.

5. If you need your apples to look fresh for a while (on a fruit tray for a Halloween party, for example) you may want to choose apples that don’t turn brown as quickly such as the Pink Ladies and Honeycrisps.

Silly Apple Bites

Ingredients

2 Honeycrisp apples, each quartered

Peanut butter or sunflower butter

Sunflower seeds or blanched slivered almonds

2-3 strawberries, sliced

Mini chocolate chips for eyes

1. Cut the middles out of each quarter of the apple to create a mouth. Don’t worry about perfection, you are filling the gap with peanut butter so if you cut too deep, you can just cover it up and no one will know.

2. Coat the inside of the cut gap with a filling of peanut butter.

3. Place some sunflower seeds on the top of the mouth for the teeth.

4. Place one sliced strawberry inside the mouth for the tongue.

5. Glue each eye with a dab of peanut butter to stick.