Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

This meal is only moderately well balanced — but on holidays, fun is more important than fiber.

Gizzards in Wizard's Blood
Makes 80 mini-meatballs

Meatballs (ahem, Gizzards)
1 pound bulk sausage
1 pound ground beef
2 large eggs
2/3 cup bread crumbs
1 teaspoon dried sage
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Sauce (or Wizard's Blood)
1 1/2 cups ketchup
2/3 cup grape jelly
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Mix all the meatball ingredients except oil together in a bowl with your hands, then mold 1-inch meatballs (you'll have about 80 total). In a large skillet, fry half the meatballs in half the oil, turning, until browned, about 6 minutes. Transfer to a plate, draining fat from the skillet. Cook remaining meatballs in remaining oil in same manner. Stir together all the sauce ingredients in the skillet. Simmer the meatballs in the sauce until cooked through, 10 minutes. Serve warm, with toothpicks for "stabbing" the gizzards. Remind the kids that toothpicks are not weapons.

What's Good for You
Ketchup is loaded with lycopene (the pigment that makes tomatoes red), a powerful antioxidant that helps prevent cell damage. Try to find a brand without high-fructose corn syrup.

Pumpkin Biscuits
Makes 16 (2-inch) biscuits

2 1/2 cups flour
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into thin slices 1 (15-ounce) can unsweetened solid-pack pumpkin

Put a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat to 400 degrees. Grease a cookie sheet. In a large bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. With a pastry blender or two knives, cut in the butter until the mixture looks like cornmeal. Stir in the pumpkin until you have a soft dough.

On a well-floured surface, with well-floured hands, pat out dough into an 8- by 8-inch square, 1 inch thick. Cut dough into 16 (2-inch) squares and transfer to the cookie sheet.

Bake the biscuits 20 minutes. Because they're already brownish to start with, you may need to break one open to see if they're done — they'll be soft and moist in the center but cooked through. Serve hot.

What's Good for You
Many brands of canned "pumpkin" are actually butternut squash. It doesn't matter nutritionally, though: Both are a rich source of beta-carotene, which converts to vitamin A. Vitamin A helps maintain healthy eyes.

Tricks for Treats

Black concentrated food-coloring paste is the busy mother's Halloween dream. You can buy it at some craft stores, like Michaels, or online at wilton.com. Stir it into the most ordinary foods — milk, scrambled eggs, peanut butter — and make them look horrifying without changing the taste a bit.

Let the kids drink — you guessed it — orange juice, and "bug" some ice cubes. Fill an ice cube tray with water, then add raisins, or dangle gummy worms half in, half out of the tray. Freeze completely.

Blue tortilla chips make nice bat wings, and salsa can be any gross bloody thing you want.

Continuing the blood theme: Vanilla yogurt or pudding looks lovely with veins of thawed frozen raspberries stirred in. (The fruit chunks themselves are blood clots.)

Let the kids dunk for apples at the table, in individual bowls. They can't make a real mess — it's just water, after all.

Create a pleasantly creepy atmosphere by using jack-o'-lanterns for candlelight. Of course this means carving your pumpkins a day early — but that's one less thing you'll have to do on Halloween night.

Mummy's Thumbs are simplicity itself: baby carrots. They can be dipped into the salsa you serve with the "bat wing" tortilla chips. Or, if you're okay with adding even more meat to this dinner, cut hot dogs in half and roll them up in pieces of refrigerated crescent-roll dough, "mummy" style, and bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes.

For Raw Eyeballs, cut an X in the stem end of cherry tomatoes, drop them into a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds, lift out with a slotted spoon, then slip off their skins. Kids who won't normally breathe the same air as a tomato may cheerfully swallow a few Raw Eyeballs.