Festive Halloween Pasta Recipes the Kids Will Love
Make a fun Halloween pasta dinner with spooky-shaped noodles and easy kid-friendly pasta sauces. These festive dinner ideas are perfect for feeding the family before trick-or-treating.
Halloween night is always so busy with costumes, candy, and trick-or-treating that Halloween dinner needs to be as easy as possible.
One of my favorite tricks for making a simple family dinner feel special is to start with a package of Halloween-shaped pasta.
Those adorable little pumpkins, ghosts, and spiders can turn even the easiest pasta recipe into a festive Halloween dinner the kids will love.
I’ve rounded up my favorite pasta sauces to pair with the fun noodles, along with a few tips for cooking them so that the cute shapes don’t fall apart before they reach your dinner table.
Fun Halloween Shaped Pasta Noodles
To make your Halloween pasta dinner even more fun, I recommend starting with a package of festive-shaped Halloween pasta.
If you can’t find something similar near you, you can order the Pastabilities Halloween pasta right here.
Its adorable bag of shaped pasta features pumpkins, ghosts, and spiders.
Even my big kids thought this made dinner so much fun.
How to Cook Shaped Pasta
If you’ve never cooked specialty-shaped pastas before, there are a couple of tricks you need to know.
First, the package directions almost always recommend cooking the pasta longer than you should.
If you boil the noodles too long, the pasta becomes so soft that the shapes easily fall apart when you drain the pot.
When the pasta pot is at a full boil, make sure you salt the water first.
Then add the pasta to the pot, give it a quick stir, and set your cooking timer for 2 minutes less than the package directions.
Use a slotted spoon to scoop a noodle out of the boiling water. Blow on it and give it a taste. It should be quite firm to the bite but shouldn’t be crunchy at the center.
If it’s still kind of crispy in the middle, then let the pasta cook just a little bit longer. The goal is to pull it from the burner as soon as it is firm-tender all the way through.
With most of the pasta sauce recipes below, the pasta will continue to cook, so don’t worry about it being too firm for your preference. It will soften up before dinner is served.
Carefully drain the pasta into a colander and let it rest. Try not to shake or move the noodles too much. The goal is to keep the shapes intact as much as possible.
Now it’s time to pick your favorite pasta sauce to go with your fun-shaped noodles.
Stovetop Mac and Cheese
If I could only pick one pasta sauce from this whole post for you to pair with your shaped noodles, it would 100% be this stovetop mac and cheese.
The creamy orange color is perfect for the holiday season, and my kids have always loved this homemade version as a pre-trick-or-treat dinner.
Creamy Autumn Pasta Sauce
If your kids prefer a red sauce, mine really love this Trader Joe’s Autumnal Harvest pasta. This is a tomato-based sauce with hints of pumpkin and butternut squash.
If you don’t have a Trader Joe’s near you, I would recommend buying this prepared butternut squash sauce and using a 50/50 mix between your favorite tomato-based sauce and this one.
Homemade Alfredo Sauce
Another fun creamy sauce that would really highlight the shape of the noodles is my homemade Alfredo sauce made with cream cheese. If you want to add a veggie, this pairs really well with frozen peas.
Hearty Beef Bolognese
If you prefer your pasta on the meatier side of things, this hearty beef bolognese is always a classic.
I make it in advance in a big pot and then freeze it in smaller containers for single-serving dinners. It’s a great make-ahead pasta sauce, so you just have to boil your shaped noodles and warm up a container of the meat sauce to spoon over the top.
Lemon Butter with Chives
And what would a list of pasta recipes for kids be if it didn’t have butter noodles on the list?
My kids like this lemon butter pasta with parmesan and chives upgrade.
Italian Pasta Salad
If you want an easy dinner that doesn’t need to be served hot because you’ve got guests coming in and out before trick-or-treating, this chilled Italian pasta salad would be so cute with the Halloween noodles.
It’d be easy to snack on as you get the kids into their Halloween costumes.
Creamy Taco Pasta
My homemade hamburger helper-style creamy taco pasta skillet usually uses elbow macaroni, but you could absolutely make the ground turkey sauce and then stir in the Halloween pasta shapes instead.
Tomato Pastina
If you don’t want to use the shaped pasta, you could make a pot of this easy tomato pastina. It’s a pasta-based soup with cute little stars in the mix. Just perfect for serving before a night out under the stars trick-or-treating.
More Halloween Ideas
Planning a not-so-spooky fun time for the family? Don’t miss these other great Halloween ideas for trick-or-treat night:
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About Tiffany
Tiffany is a home-cooking enthusiast, three-time cookbook author, and creator of the sites Peanut Blossom, Peanut Blossom Book Club, and Don’t Just Fly. She believes that family dinner can be manageable, fun, and — most importantly — tasty. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters and can often be found baking a loaf of bread with her beloved bread machine, reading a good book, or planning her family’s next adventure.