Halloween dinner in Christine Wisnewski’s Vienna home is often a balancing act between healthy and sugary. On the sweetest holiday of the year, for example, the mother and culinary instructor at Culinaria Cooking School, also in Vienna, prepares a wholesome dinner for her eager trick-or-treaters, managing candy-induced sugar highs and inevitable post-confection lows.

“It is a treat-themed holiday. … No parent wants to be a killjoy, so if you are going to sanction having the candy around, there has to be a strategy for managing it,” she said.

Whether it’s ghoulish or cutesy, Halloween dinner can set the tone for the rest of the evening, as well as help manage those sugar highs and lows. Not an easy feat. “Dinner on Halloween can be a particular challenge with kids eager to get out the door,” said Wisnewski.

Preparing dinner in advance of the holiday and rolling it out before trick-or-treaters set out on their candy-collecting treks is often effective. “This way they leave the house with the fuel they need to get to every last house in the neighborhood and are less likely to dig into the stash they are collecting,” said Wisnewski.

Wisnewski and other local chefs suggest slipping in a family meal without a rebellion by setting a spooky tone for dinner and preparing eerily bewitching recipes.

Traditional shepherd’s pie — hearty ground beef or lamb and vegetables buried under a mountain of fluffy mashed potatoes — becomes a graveyard on Halloween in the hands of Chef Kristen Robinson, an Arlington resident and an instructor at The International Culinary School at The Art Institute of Washington, also in Arlington. “[Print] cardboard cut-outs in the shape of tombstones for your children to decorate while dinner is being prepared,” she said. “Serve with the decorated tombstone propped up behind your casserole and enjoy your graveyard pie.”

Halloween cookie cutters can also put a spine-chilling spin on everyday fare, says Wisnewski. “Turkey and avocado or hummus sandwiches are more fun when they take the shape of ghosts and bats,” she said. “Cheese and crackers can be embellished with green or black olive ‘eyes.’ Black bean dip, white bean dip or guacamole look creepy dished up with some carved jicama fingers poking out, or some bat shaped whole wheat tortillas or blue corn tortilla chips for dipping.”

For a frightful appetizer or snack, Robinson puts a spooky twist on breadsticks. “You serve a pile of bones, which are really crunchy breadsticks that you make using dough that you shape like bones and then bake,” she said. “After the bones cool, you can serve them with roasted red pepper hummus or sun-dried tomato hummus and tell your children their snack is a pile of bones with mashed monster brains.”

FOR A LESS SPOOKY, but still festive dish, Arlington culinary instructor Andrea Nelson of Creative Kids Kitchen recommends a quick and easy pumpkin seed bread. “It’s a great bread because it’s got the texture of a cake bread, like banana bread, but is not as sweet and has extra nutrients from the wheat germ, buttermilk and of course the pumpkin seeds,” she said, suggesting that parents roast the seeds from pumpkins their families carved rather than use store-bought seeds for some extra festive spirit.

Don’t be afraid to try healthy Halloween treats, either. Anna Reeves, culinary instructor and owner of Tiny Chefs, which has locations in Arlington, Alexandria, McLean and Fairfax, Va., and Potomac, Md., said, “There are definitely lots of healthy alternatives to sugary sweets like fresh or dried fruits and granola or energy mixes.”

Even fruit can become scream-worthy. Both Robinson and Wisnewski turn ordinary bananas into ghosts and ghouls. “Make some banana ghosts by putting half a banana on a popsicle stick, dip the banana in orange juice and roll it in shredded coconut. You can add two mini-chocolate chips for eyes and freeze the ghosts until they are firm,” said Wisnewski.

In Robinson’s kitchen, the curvy, yellow fruit becomes a monster with a few strokes of a makeshift paintbrush. “Cut the bananas lengthwise and dip them into different colored chocolates and let your children decorate them with more colored chocolate, or sprinkles, pretzels and raisins,” she said. “Your children can use the back end of the skewer as a paintbrush to paint faces on their Frankenstein, ghost or vampire bananas.” Colored chocolate can be found at many craft stores.

It’s OK if you don’t have a lot of time, Wisnewski said. “At the very least, label that bowl of grapes on the kitchen counter ‘zombie eyes.’”