Getting kids to eat healthy can be a bit of a chore. In a world where boxed macaroni and frozen fish sticks are an easy way to satisfy your kids, getting them to eat fruits and vegetables isn’t always the easiest. When you’re cooking for kids, it helps to get a little bit creative. When I was young, my parents would make me ants on a log, which is typically peanut butter spread over a piece of celery with raisins pressed into the peanut butter. How things have changed! I stumbled upon this idea for fruit and veggie bug snacks and had to share.
Let’s dig right in to this adorable, kid-friendly recipe.
Vegetable bug snacks ingredients
To make your delicious vegetable bug snacks, you will need:
- 3 celery stalks
- 5-10 black olives
- 10 cashews
- 1 bunch of chives
- 10 cucumber slices
- 2 mini cucumbers
- 1/2 cup of cream cheese (vegan cream cheese is a viable option)
- 1 cup of cherry tomatoes
If you don’t use up all your tomatoes, this is a great way to store them so they’ll last.
Fruit bug snacks ingredients
If you want to make fruit bug snacks as well (or instead), this is what you will need:
- 3 celery stalks
- 1/4 cup of chocolate chips (dairy free is a viable option)
- 1 apple
- 1/2 cup of blueberries
- 1 cup of grapes
- 4 strawberries
- 1/2 cup of nut butter
Instructions
Ready to get to making these bug snacks? It’s a little bit of an involved process but you’ll love the adorable little snacks you make.
- First, we need to work on making the eyes for our snacks. For the fruit bugs, you’ll want to place two small dollops of cream cheese on a plate. Take your chocolate chips and gently press them into the cream cheese dollops. For the vegetable bugs, the eyes are made from cream cheese and black olives. Do the same with the cream cheese, but use a small straw to core the olives. Cut the olive cores to the right side and stick them onto the cream cheese. Just like that, your bugs have eyes!
- Use the visual guide above to prepare the remaining fruit and vegetable ingredients.
- The celery sticks and mini cucumbers will be the bases for your bug snacks. For the mini cucumbers, it is recommended that you remove the seeds and slice a bit of the round side off to help flatten the cucumber, making it more stable. Piping bags will help you cleanly deliver the peanut butter and cream cheese to the concave portion of the celery sticks you’ve chopped.
- From there, you can your kids can use your imagination! There are endless kind of delicious bugs that you can make from these vegetables.
Enjoy!
