Easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups are a fun way to serve salad at Halloween. Plus, they are a good way to enlist your children to help make dinner and to eat their veggies!

If you have teenagers, you can enlist their help in hollowing out the oranges. If you have little ones, you can get them to mix up the salad and put it in the easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups as Princess P is doing – so serious! Princess P is one of my great-nieces and she and her younger sister, Princess Sweetie Pie, were over for dinner the other night after a trip to the pumpkin patch.

I told her to smile for the camera!

Kids like to help so why not let them? Who knows, maybe Princess P will grow up liking to cook! Here she is mixing together a pre-made packaged salad – you know, one of those kits that comes with the prepared veggies, some fun additions like bacon bits, nuts, or crispy chips and salad dressing. All she had to do was pour it all into a mixing bowl, add the dressing and toss!

Here she is trying to maneuver the tossed salad into the easy jack-o-lantern salad cups using the tongs with one hand and holding the jack-o-lantern cup in the other. Not an easy task for an 8-year-old!

But she did it with no help from me! I was too busy taking photos! Here she’s adding more salad to the Easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups.

Last one!

Platter of Easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups!

Then we transferred them to this beautiful silver platter, the center painted with chalkboard paint, for the photo shot.

I didn’t forget one for Pinterest! Please share – thanks! At dinner, the discussion meandered over to what to do with these cute Easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups after we finished eating our salad. Of course, I came up with an idea…

I rinsed them out carefully and stored them in a plastic container in the refrigerator. The next day, I placed them on a baking sheet and baked them at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 hours!

Then I found some battery-operated Halloween tea lights and made them into luminarias!

But, you know what? They really didn’t need the battery-operated Halloween tea lights because they glowed all by themselves! So cute!

I made you a luminaria collage for Pinterest, too!

Here’s the recipe:

Easy Jack-O-Lantern Salad Cups

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A fun and cute way to serve salad during Halloween season!

Author: Carole from Toot Sweet 4 Two
Prep Time: 30 mins
Total Time: 30 mins
Yield: 6 1x
Category: Salad
Cuisine: American

Ingredients

Scale

6 large oranges
2 – 7 ounce bags of favorite pre-made salad mix, dressing included (I used 2 different kinds – a Kale salad for the adults and a Ranch salad for the kids)

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Instructions

Slice the top off of each orange as close to the top as possible.
Using a large, sharp knife, run knife blade carefully around inside edge of each orange, far enough down to loosen as much of the orange as possible, but not so far down as to cut a hole in the bottom of the orange.
Using a soup spoon, scoop out the orange pulp, scraping the inside of the orange as clean as possible, again without ripping or tearing the orange (in other words, take your time and be careful); save the pulp for another use such as fresh orange juice.
Rinse orange cups and turn upside down and allow to dry.
Using a small, sharp knife, cut a Jack-O-Lantern face in each orange cup.
Toss your pre-made, pre-packaged salad according to package directions and fill up each orange cup.
Serve immediately.

Notes

The Jack-O-Lantern orange cups can be made the day ahead. Just carefully place finished oranges in a ziplock bag and store in the refrigerator until the next day. To make the Jack-O-Lantern orange cup luminarias, after salad has been eaten, rinse cups under cold water and allow to drain. If not making the luminarias immediately, place in plastic bag and store in the refrigerator until the next day. Preheat oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, place carved orange cups on a baking sheet and bake for 2 hours. Allow to cool and place a battery-operated Halloween tea light in each.

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