Countdown to Halloween - Day 4 - Jack O'Lantern Theme

Today was the fourth day of the Countdown to Halloween. This was the first day that we've been home all day which was nice. We spent the full day homeschooling and getting caught up on some subjects that we wanted to focus on.

Although I had wanted to do a few more pumpkin/jack o'lantern theme activities (like carve pumpkins and make pumpkin seeds), I realized that even doing a couple things was better than trying to do too much and not enjoying the process. We'll carve pumpkins tomorrow.

For dinner, I made pumpkin grilled cheese sandwiches. I saw the idea on Pinterest; and the pin led to Clean and Scentsible.

The grilled cheese sandwiches don't have pumpkin in them, it's just the face that is cut into the top piece of bread.

It's an easy recipe. Lightly toast the bread and butter one side. Cut out a face (eyes and mouth are plenty...otherwise you won't have much bread left).

Place one piece of bread butter side down on a baking sheet. The original recipe suggested adding a layer of cream cheese or ricotta cheese and then topping with cheddar cheese. I didn't put the cream cheese or ricotta cheese in the sandwich because I knew that Olivia wouldn't like that. I just used cheese slices which was easy and something that she would eat.

Top with the slice of bread that has the face cut out (butter side up).  Bake at 300 degrees F for approximately 10 minutes.

Note: Although this was an easy recipe to make, the crust did get rather hard. We agreed that grilled cheese sandwiches made on the griddle is our preferred method for making them. 

For dessert, we made a orange and black dessert as shown on this pin on Pinterest. It led to Frog Prince Paperie. The picture showed tall, clear glasses filled with the ingredients. Although the image is pretty, that would be an awfully big dessert (and a lot of sugar). We opted to make the dessert in tinier containers that would hold a more appropriate-size dessert.

Ingredients:

- Vanilla Pudding - we used instant pudding which was made and set in about  five minutes. The original recipe suggested that pre-made little snack pack cups could be used instead of making pudding. The pudding was yellow (even though it was vanilla). I'm thinking a white chocolate pudding might have resulted in a lighter pudding color.

- Non-pariels (in orange) - I could find these, so we used orange decorator sugar.

- Oreos, crushed.

Directions:

Drop a few spoonfuls of pudding into the glass or container. Sprinkle in the orange non-pariels. Add more pudding and then some crushed-up Oreos. Keep repeating these ingredients until the glass or container is full.

This was very simple to make and something that we would do again.

As a side note, these little green dessert bowls were some of my parents' dishes. My parents always did special things for us around Halloween. Having these bowls be part of our Halloween celebrating this week reminds me of them; and how creating family traditions and wonderful memories of different holidays is something I can treasure...no matter what my age.