While Halloween may look a little different this year, there is still plenty of freakishly good fun to scare up, like making a spectacularly spooky snack board from the Foodie Classroom. So ghoulishly good, your little ghosts and goblins won’t even notice it’s frightfully healthy, too. No tricks, just treats!
Here are the recipes for our spooky snack board:
Cheese and Veggie Skewers With Garlic-Dill Dip
Fruit and Marshmallow Skewers with Spiced Yogurt and Honey Dip
Banana Ghosts and Monster Apple Mouths with Chocolate Dip
Also, here’s a Recommended Shopping List and Equipment List.
For more ideas about at-home learning experiences you can do with your kids, visit the main page, Charter a Voyage of Learning.
Fall in the Foodie Classroom
It’s approaching the end of October. The fall season is well underway, and the spicy aromas and flavors of pumpkin, apple, cinnamon and other spices perfume the air. By now, most parents and their children have also become accustomed to shifts in schooling as we continue to implement safety measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones, which means continued learning at home and social distancing at home. But as I mentioned in my summer post, Cookin’ Smart in the Foodie Classroom With Chef Dave, new opportunities are being created for learning. In July, I presented a few culinary science lessons that I hope many parents and kids did together, experimenting with foods to explore the sensory experiences of taste and smell, while understanding how math is critical in cooking. Summer is long gone, but I encourage you to go back and experiment with those recipes. You can even revisit those lessons with the aromas and flavors of fall.
Our project today in the Foodie Classroom is to make a spooky snack board, perfect for Halloween. What’s sneaky about this snack board is that the treats are healthy, too.
Cheese and Veggie Skewers With Garlic-Dill Dip
The cheese and the vegetables create contrasting colors and textures on the skewers. The dip adds flavors of herbs and spices. Find the recipe here.
Fruit and Marshmallow Skewers with Spiced Yogurt and Honey Dip
The fruits and the marshmallows are both sweet, but the fruit has sour notes, too. The dip combines sweet honey with sour yogurt, and spice flavors. Find the recipe here.
Banana Ghosts and Monster Apple Mouths with Chocolate Dip
Kids love apples and bananas; this recipe just makes them spookier. The chocolate dip adds a rich flavor. Find the recipe here.
Be sure to stock up with this Recommended Shopping List and Equipment List.
I hope you have had fun exploring these seasonal recipes in the Foodie Classroom!
Local Connection: Foodie Classroom with Dave Terrazas
These activities are based on a program Chef Dave Terrazas created while serving as Chef and Campus Garden Manager for Allen Academy in College Station, Texas. The program combined Chef Dave’s kitchen and garden experience into teaching resources for the private school’s faculty, which was subsequently developed into the Culinary and Wellness Program at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, where Chef Dave served as Resident Chef and Program Manager. Chef Dave has since founded Foodie Classroom, a curriculum-based online platform designed for children, parents, caregivers and educators aimed at teaching math and science through the anatomy of food. Foodie Classroom, set to launch in the summer of 2020, will take participants on a virtual culinary learning adventure as Chef Dave visits with local area farms, gardens, parks, and kitchens to create innovative, video content that helps children learn in ways that they can understand. Everybody has a relationship with food; this series of video tutorials will empower children to develop culinary life skills, helping them to build their food literacy and confidence in the kitchen. Chef Dave will highlight like-minded community members to teach lessons on location in various parts of San Antonio, providing a familiar backdrop for kids to recognize and enjoy.
More Resources About Cooking and Education
The original Foodie Classroom blog was a way for Chef Dave to communicate menus and connected food service activities with curriculum to students, parents, and faculty at Allen Academy, where he served as Chef and Garden Manager:
Chef Dave discusses the power of food and its relationship with civil stability—“S.A.’s Freshest Chef,” Lindsey Carnett, San Antonio Express-News, September 14, 2017
The driver behind Chef Dave’s work stems from Allen’s “Theory of Food,” which posits that people develop a relationship with food by age seven: “Growing a ‘Theory of Food,'” John S. Allen, Psychology Today, October 6, 2014. This made Chef Dave begin to wonder if we could not only program a healthy relationship with food through children’s programming, but use food as a contextual component for understanding other elements of our world via STEM curriculum.
Charter Moms Chats
Watch Chef Dave Terrazas, owner of Foodie Classroom, demonstrate the spooky snack board for Inga Cotton on Charter Moms Chats on October 30, 2020 at 4 PM Central live on Facebook and YouTube.
For more ideas about at-home learning experiences you can do with your kids, visit the main page, Charter a Voyage of Learning. If your family enjoys cooking, look at these posts from the summer: Cookin’ Smart in the Foodie Classroom With Chef Dave and Whis-Kid Guidebook.
Find all the spooky snack board recipes from this activity at these links:
Cheese and Veggie Skewers With Garlic-Dill Dip
Fruit and Marshmallow Skewers with Spiced Yogurt and Honey Dip
Banana Ghosts and Monster Apple Mouths with Chocolate Dip
Also, here’s a Recommended Shopping List and Equipment List.
About the Author
Chef Dave Terrazas is the owner of Foodie Classroom. He is a Texas native, and formerly a defense and homeland security analyst researching precursors of social instability, including hunger and food insecurity. Cooking since he was a child, Dave’s global travels added to a growing interest in the culinary arts, culminating in the launch of a second career as a chef, horticulturalist, and food security activist. Dave holds degrees from American Military University, Wayland Baptist University, and Le Cordon Bleu. Beyond restaurant and institutional food service, Dave has been a private school chef and campus garden manager, a research associate at the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University supporting climate-based coffee resiliency research, the resident chef and Culinary and Wellness Program Manager of the San Antonio Botanical Garden, and a managing chef with Mercy Chefs, a humanitarian relief organization that provides food service immediately following emergencies and disasters. Dave is currently a partner of Edible San Antonio magazine, and is launching the magazine’s official podcast in July 2020. Dave also owns Foodie Classroom, an online learning resource that combines STEM standards of learning with agronomic, horticultural and culinary arts concepts, and uses farms, gardens, parks and kitchens as the classroom to create fun, immersive content for learning at home, or in the blended learning environment. Dave serves as education chair for the San Antonio chapter of the Texas Chefs Association (TCA), and additionally maintains a column in Edible San Antonio called Food for the Soul, where he provides a narrative of his work, and covers food security and local foodways-related topics. Dave also plays jazz.
