Local Mom Attempts to Make Halloween Healthy

Maggie da Silva got tired of seeing her kids pound candy on Halloween. She saw them suffer from not only the sugar high but also the sugar low: the crash after injesting too much of the sweet stuff.

The trick, she said, is filling the kids up with healthier treats - "real food" - before they go out trick and treating. But to keep the holiday fun, da Silva decided to make the food spooky.

Witches fingers, anyone?

"For our kids, we finally learned if they don't eat something, they have an insane melt down," said da Silva.

And so in "Real Family Halloween," da Silva's just published e-book, you'll find recipes for Witches Fingers (cheese sticks with shaved almonds for fingernails), meatloaf mummies (meatloaf shaped into a stick figure with strips of dough surrounding it) and pumpkin cupcakes (carrott cake made to look Halloween-like). 

"Kids are funny about shapes," she said.

da Silva hopes the book can help parents handle the sweet holiday.

"The less parents have to do, the more fun they can have with their kids," she said. "I am inspired by parents like me. Parents who are super busy but definitely doing the family thing."

da Silva is a holiday junkie, and she also takes pictures of the neighborhood's Halloween decorations and posts them on her blog.