Halloween Party Food!

So! Have you decided yet what kind of food you’re going to have at your Halloween party? If you haven’t, you’d better hurry up!

Fortunately there’s a lot you can do almost at the last minute, taking not much more time than any other meal, with a bit of creativity. You know how to draw a face, right? Or at least a pair of eyes? I mean, I’m looking at you!

I’ve gotten more serious about Halloween eats in the last ten years or so. It started in 2015, when Sue and I decided to take Halloween on the road! We don’t usually get many trick-or-treater children in our neighborhood, so we decided to show up at my parents’, unannounced, with a meal and goodies, and in costume. We rang the doorbell and when Dad opened it (expecting children), we yelled “trick or treat!” and then took over their living room.

We hung orange and black streamers, replaced all their normal light bulbs with orange or purple ones, strung up some purple string lights, stuck a battery-operated strobe light in a plastic pumpkin, and handed funny hats to them to wear. I think we all had stick-on fake mustaches that year, too.

We had all kinds of goodies to eat. That year (as I recall), we had a frozen cheese pizza to which I’d applied pieces of black olives, bell peppers, and pepperonis arranged to look like spiders, bugs, and spooky faces. I made a sweet, cream-cheese pumpkin dip (to have with sliced apples), and cookies in the shape of “witches’ fingers.” I carved a “barfing pumpkin,” set it on a big tray, and had a mild black-bean-and-corn salsa coming out of its mouth, and blue corn tortillas strewn around.

It was such a fun time, we did it the next year. And the next. And indeed, each year since then. The costumes and makeup change, the decorations change, and the food changes, but the fun continues.

The past few years, I’ve taken the time to click some photos of the food. And I’ve got a nice little “Halloween” section of my recipe files. What will I make this year?!

Here are some possibilities. Some are pretty basic; you just add decorations clipped out of vegetables, like I did atop the pizza. The recipes for lot of these can be found online.

Beverages

• Caramel-Apple Sangria (pinot grigio, apple cider, Smirnoff “Kissed Caramel” vodka, sliced apples).
• Anything brightly colored served in test tubes. I don’t know where you get test tubes.
• Apple Butter Old Fashioned (apple butter, bitters, apple cider, bourbon, club soda, serve on rocks in bar glass; sugar rim; garnish apple slices and cinnamon stick).
• “Jason’s Juice” punch (Google it; make a sugar syrup with orange zest, cloves, cinnamon stick, plus cranberry (crangrape?) juice, sparkling cider; freeze water in a Halloween mask and float it in the punch as a creepy face).
• Fun fact: tonic water glows under a black light!

Main Dish Ideas

• Meatloaf shaped like a big hand, onion “bone” sticking out of wrist, beet leaf midvein/stem as “veins”; once cooked, carefully move onto a bed of green-colored mashed potatoes (see side dishes below).
• Meatloaf shaped like a zombie head (chopped white onion teeth, olives for eyes, ketchup in the mouth, etc.).
• Cheese pizza decorated with trimmed veggies, pepperonis, to make faces, spiders, etc. Sausage or hamburger meatballs plus sliced olives can be eyes.
• Lasagna decorated as above.
• Shepherd’s pie decorated as above (use pureed-spinach-green-colored mashed potatoes).
• Any autumnal/hearty dish, such as baked squash, bean soup, beef stew, chili, haluski (kielbasa and butter-fried cabbage and onions).
• Hot dogs wrapped with puff pastry to look like mummies.
• Poke uncooked spaghetti noodles through uncooked hot dogs; plunge into simmering water until both are cooked. They will look like space aliens or squids.
• Ruby Ann Boxcar’s Monster Casserole (from her Down Home Trailer Park Holiday Cookbook), “the color alone is enough to frighten small children”: cream of corn soup colored green; cooked egg noodles colored orange; cubed Spam, a can of corn, a small package of Velveeta, cubed . . . put in a casserole and bake. (I’ve never made this one . . . yet.)

Side Dishes

• Mashed potatoes (buy them premade to save time), colored green with pureed fresh or thawed frozen spinach (use a bullet blender). Pro tip: heat the mashed potatoes well, first, and then add the spinach puree. If you heat the spinach too long, your green will turn olive green, and the flavor will suffer.
• Cornbread colored green with food coloring. You can put faces on each piece, using cut up veggies.
• Deviled eggs (roasted red bell pepper puree makes the middle nice and orange); shape like pumpkins; or can turn upside down, poke out holes using a straw to make a “Jason” face mask.
• Spooky tomato slices (add eyeballs made of olives); serve on lettuce leaf.
• Brain-shaped Jell-O molds are mighty useful for Halloween Jell-O salads!
• Bell peppers carved like Jack-o-lanterns; can steam, carefully, and fill with mac and cheese, or sauteed veggies, or whatever.
• Barfing pumpkin: carve to make it look like a puking face, including a gaping mouth low on the face. Chopped salads or dips can be arranged to look like they are spewing onto a tray. Guacamole is good; so is black bean and corn salsa; slaw, Waldorf salad, or chopped kale salad work well, too.
• Colorful Halloween slaw: shredded red cabbage, shredded carrot, some matchstick/julienned tart apple; a light vinaigrette; garnish with raw pumpkin seeds.

Desserts

• Brain mold cheesecake: use a Jell-O brain mold and instant cherry cheesecake mix. You night need two boxes. Add some Knox gelatin to ensure it will gel hard enough to unmold; spray mold lightly with Pam. Serve atop the blood-red cherry goo.
• Pumpkin patch brownies (a pan of brownies decorated with candy-corn pumpkins, with vines added using green icing and appropriate pastry tips).
• Pumpkin roll (you can buy these now!)
• Sweet Pumpkin–Cream Cheese dip (cream cheese, pumpkin puree, powdered sugar, pie spice, vanilla extract; can fold in whipped topping and chopped snickers, Kit-Kats, mini M&Ms, whatever); dip apple slices, plain cookies, carrot and celery sticks, pretzels, whatever.
• Ye Olde Kitty Litter Cake, with crushed sandwich cookies mixed with crumbled cake and vanilla pudding, and Tootsie-Roll cat turds. A beloved Halloween classic.

More Sweet Treats

• Nutter Butter cookies dipped in melted chocolate (milk, dark, or white) on one side, with 2 eyes added (Wilton makes edible cookie-decorating eyes).
• Witches’ fingers cookies; roll cookie dough like a snake and shape into gnarly fingers; use sliced or blanched almond (or a cashew nut) for fingernail. Extra points for red gel icing “blood” at base of finger.
• “Impaled head” buckeye candies. You draw little faces on them with a toothpick and dark food coloring. I saw this online somewhere but it’s disappeared. Maybe it was too gross and they took it down.
• Rice Krispies Treats, colored green or purple (food coloring); decorated with Wilton eye decorations.
• Spider cookies: make chocolate chip cookies; while still hot, use a toothpick in the melted chocolate drops on top to delicately add “legs.”
• Gingerbread haunted house.
• Pretzel cigs. Dip small pretzel sticks 2/3 of the way in white chocolate. Dip the tips in bright orange chocolate and then dip in silver sugar sprinkles. When dry/hard, arrange on a big (clean) ashtray, with extra sugar sprinkles in the middle for “ashes.”
• Popcorn balls: an old-school favorite. There are many recipes for these. This year, I’m trying the one made with Orange Jell-O.

Old School Halloween Refreshments

These are from old party books from the late 1930s and 1940s.

• Nut cookies
• Candied apples on sticks
• Cake
• “Witches’ brew” (fruit punch).
• “A Halloween Campfire”: bacon, wieners, buns, eggs, pickles, coffee; molasses candy; toasted marshmallows.
• “A Hard Luck Hobo Party”: hot dogs; coffee or hot chocolate.
• “A Hard Times Party”: sandwiches wrapped in newspaper; coffee.
• “A Harvest Party”: corn muffins, coffee, popcorn balls, crackerjacks
• “A Halloween Frolic”: coffee, sandwiches, pumpkin pie, apples (bobbing)

Are you still out of ideas? Then do what I do every year, just for fun: do a Google image search on “Halloween food” and “Halloween beverages” and see what you get!

Happy Halloween!

Oh, look! Another YouTube video posted by the Opulent Opossum!

At only about 25 seconds, this video does not represent a major investment in your time. I hope you enjoy this year's installment of the Broadway and Elm Halloween window! Boo!

More Halloween Fun

Hi folks! It's been a busy autumn, but I've found time to acknowledge one of my favorite holidays, Halloween! Like last year, I hung up a Walgreen's-bought "reaper" decoration in our top window facing Broadway and rigged up lights and strobe lights to draw attention to it. To remind you, here's a photo from last year:



This year, Sue suggested I add an oscillating fan so that it would occasionally blow onto it and make it move! Oh! What a great idea! Even more spooky!

So now, once again, it's all on a timer: There's a green shop light on one side and an orange one on the other, a string of regular small Christmas lights laying in a bunch in the window sill (to provide some orangish light from below), and three strobe lights zapping at different rates . . . plus the oscillating fan.

It's not a spectacular video, but here's a quick glimpse of what it looks like! (The sound of a car going by at just the right moment makes it extra spooky!) Mooooah-hah-hah-hah-hahhh!

Whatever you're doing for Halloween, I hope it's spooky good fun!

Woooo! Happy Halloween!

For as warm as Christmas can be, and as bracing as New Year’s Eve, Halloween remains my personal favorite holiday: There are no expectations, no “shoulds.” You do what you want. It’s not particularly religious (though you can make it so), and there are no travel or familial requirements. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do anything at all.

It’s not everybody’s cup of tea! Don’t like trick-or-treaters? Well, hand out tins of liver pâté, or handfuls of cough drops, to les petits monstres.



But little kids generally love Halloween, and so do adults. It can be as adorable as a little kid dressed in a clown suit, or draped with a bedsheet with holes cut for eyes and the word “BOO!” written on it for good measure.



Or it can be as raunchy and lewd as “acting out” one’s secret Dracula fantasies. (Ooh-la-la!) Or . . . fill in the blank. (Look at all the “sexy” and “naughty” doctor and nurse, cops, pirates, etc. costumes made these days for adults.)

Or it can be anything in between. People have always had a great time at costume balls. You’re in charge of your own Halloween fun!

If you haven’t been to one, go visit one of those seasonal “everything Halloween” stores. Or, better, go to downtown Columbia and visit the costume store Gotcha! this time of year. What fun!

Halloween gives us a chance to “be” something we are not, or are not allowed to be. Halloween, for instance, has traditionally been popular in the LGBT community, in part because we can dress quite gloriously in ways society generally is uncomfortable with. Such as drag. Or police outfits. Gay folks can be particularly creative and hilarious with all kinds of costumes. Maybe, like a bunch of thespians, we’ve had a little more practice in “thinking outside the box” regarding “who” we can be.

And there’s an “edgy” side to Halloween—it’s scary, spooky, dark . . . thrilling. Mischievous. Naughty. (Though some people, however, take this waaaay too far. I mean, these days, it can be just sick. I blame those over-the-top disgusting movies.)

As a kid, if I had been given a choice between going to a kid’s birthday party, or to a Halloween party, there would be no question! Halloween parties were (and still are) incredibly fun! You never know what to expect!

The treats are great—pumpkin-spice “everything,” apples in all their permutations, cookies, candy, hot dogs that look like mummies, popcorn balls, etc.

And then there’s the decorations! Maybe I’m a frustrated stage and set designer, but I love creating scary-looking effects with dummies and masks, fabric, and lighting.

Which leads me to the following pictures—I’m particularly proud of our decorations this year! Photos don’t do it justice, since you have to see it in the dark, and there’s a strobe-effect light.

The “dummy” is a “Reaper” I bought at the local Walgreen’s. I’d passed it by, resisting my urge to buy it on the spot, during a few previous visits to the store, but I finally purchased it a few nights ago. When you press a button, its face and hands flash with internal lights, and a ridiculous recorded voice cackles “AH—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! AAAHHH—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaa!!!!”

But I thought it looks cool, anyway. It has just that wicked touch. But not revolting. And it’s very lightweight.

First thing I did when I got it home was hang it from our living room ceiling fan and turn it on low speed—Ha! It looked really cool! Wooooo!!!



Originally, I’d thought to hang it on a stiff rod outside our top front dormer, so it’d look like it was flying into or out of our house! But it’s not quite weather resistant. Plus, all the spiders and the multicolored Asian lady beetles and the box elder bugs . . . nah. . . . So, Plan B!

I hung it so it’s looking out of the window of the third floor facing Broadway, then rigged a bunch of lights, including a green light and a strobe-type light, to flash and shine on it.



I put those on a timer, so all evening long it flashes up there for all to see. It’s in a spare bedroom we don’t use much, so I just keep the door shut (so the flashing won’t give me a seizure or anything).

Anyway—this didn’t take a lot of work, but I had a blast putting it together. The moon gives it an especially eerie glow!



If you’re in Jeff City, drive by and check it out. It’s not a huge-scale thing, but I suspect it would be kinda interesting to a passerby—it would make you look twice!



I hope you have a happy Halloween, however you celebrate it!

Happy Halloween!

For your amusement, a blast from the past: excerpts from Let's Have a Good Time: A Plan Book for Successful Socials, by Olive Cameron (Cincinnati: Standard Publishing Co., 1938), 91-96.




There's a section in the book for "A Party a Month," and for October, of course, one of the suggestions is a "Halloween Frolic."

A Halloween party for your society is an excellent idea, as it has long ago been proven that affairs of this nature are always beneficial, not only in a social way, but they are sure to radiate interest to the extent of an increase in membership. Don't omit the decorations--black cats, bats, owls, witches, black-and-yellow paper festoons, jack-o'-lanterns, etc.

The suggested games and activities include a game of "Halloween Similes" to act out in pantomime ("silent as a ghost"; "as blind as a bat"; "as sour as an apple"); "Toss the Ball" (into a cut-out jack-o'-lantern's mouth); and "Corn Relay" (don't drop the handful of loose kernels as you pass it from one to the next).

--Yawn!

But then there's this!

Queen of Halloween.--All guests, one at a time, must appear before the Queen of Halloween. Kneel and lift the right hand for her blessing. The queen, with pasteboard crown, sits on her throne over in the corner. She wears on her right hand a glove, which has sewed in its palm a copper wire, off the end of which has been scraped the insulation [ha ha ha!--note the grammatical gymnastics to avoid ending that sentence with a preposition!]. This wire runs around back of her to the floor, where it is connected with a battery. This battery is so arranged that the queen can throw on the current by stepping on a switch. The switch and battery, of course, are covered by her dress. As the victim kneels and extends his hand, the queen grasps it as if to shake hands, throws on the switch and the subject leaps to his feet with a wild yell.

--Yeeeooww!!




And this!

Apple Antics.--This will prove a most amusing race for the boys as participants and for the girls as spectators. An apple is provided for each boy and is placed on a newspaper on the floor. With his hands tied behind him, each boy endeavors to eat his apple first, in hog fashion.

I think this would indeed be amusing to watch!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

P.S. Please keep your pets indoors tonight. Dogs and cats don't appreciate Halloween nearly as much as we do.