Frightful Feasting
Halloween Ideas
This ran as a "Ravenous" column in October 2007 in the Woodstock Times and the Kingston Times, Ulster Publishing, NY.
I love Halloween because I have an excuse to act like a kid and do wild outrageous things. I can dress up, Sybil-like, as one of my assortment of alter egos: witch, housewife, Cleopatra, Count Dracula or swamp queen. I can cook crazy things like gelatin brains or eyeballs made of cheese and make people eat them.
But Halloween is a holiday probably more concerned with body parts than food parts, as it thrills us with its hint of taboo. We love to shock, scare, creep out and freak out ourselves and each other, via props, costumes or party offerings. We celebrate Halloween to remind ourselves that although life is folding up and preparing to hibernate for the winter, we’re still alive, wildly and crazily alive, compared to the un-dead characters we like to dress up as. The need to forget about the chill of winter and distract ourselves by concentrating on ghoulishness is an ageless feeling that we’ve known since pre-Christian Celts celebrated Samhain, an annual new year’s festival when people mingled with dead souls, the precursor, before many alternations, to our modern Halloween.
Although my children are too young yet for the type of frightful fête I’d love to throw, I’ve been planning it for years now, collecting books, magazines and computer files with ideas for scary, gross, or just plain silly decorations, party games and foods. You can cheat and give creepy names to what you serve for Halloween; just insert “Monster” or “Haunted” in front of the name of the dish. In Philadelphia, near the Halloween exhibit Terror Behind the Walls, held at the defunct Eastern State Penitentiary where Al Capone once dwelled, participating restaurants offer “Fright and a Bite” packages, with dishes like “Slithery Papardelle Pasta with Plenty of Mushrooms Picked from the Graveyard,” “Roasted, Toasted and Tortured Chestnut Soup,” “Cemetery Greens Tossed with a Bloody Vinaigrette” or “Pan Seared and Whipped Beyond Consciousness 8 oz. Filet Mignon with Whipped and Sternly Questioned Yukon Gold Potato.”
But to create dishes so that the food itself truly evokes Halloween, whether by its colors or resemblance to body parts, takes more planning. For starters, offer pumpkin seeds and label them witches’ teeth, or fingernails, roasting them during the party so guests can inhale the evocative aroma. Make your deviled eggs truly devilish by cracking the shells lightly after boiling and soaking them in strong tea to give them a ghastly hue, before stuffing with a extra spicy filling and topping the filling with tiny pepper triangles to simulate the devil’s horns and goatee.
Festive for Halloween is anything baked in a pumpkin, whose flesh is scooped out with the food as it’s served. It can be a hearty soup, chili, stew or a mix of seasoned ground meats. Or you can just cook your dish in a regular saucepot and serve it in small individual raw scooped out pumpkins. You can toss black squid ink pasta with an orange bell pepper sauce, cook rice with carrots and black olives, or stuff quesadillas with drained black beans, orange cheese and orange peppers, adding fresh cilantro and sautéed garlic and onion for added zest. Make an Indian-inspired shrimp sauté deep yellow with saffron or turmeric and sprinkle it with nigella or black sesame seeds. Consider a large rat made out of ground meatloaf mix, or go beyond just serving ribs with a cute Halloween-y name to actually arraying them like a human ribcage, with a whole red pepper in the middle to look like a heart, a sharp knife jutting out of it.
Halloween parties for grown-ups aren’t complete without creepy cocktails or punches. Lychees stuffed with a blueberry look like eyeballs when dropped in drinks, fake eyeballs of all kinds being a Halloween party classic. You can serve straight black Sambuca or make drinks with black vodka, like martinis with jalapeño-stuffed black olives. A combo of blue Curacao and pomegranate juice is said to turn any drink black, or try blue food coloring with orange liqueur. You can drop a scoop of ice cream in a Black Russian and call it a ghost. Cassis, a black currant liqueur, makes drinks dark as night too, and splashes of black currant nectar help make drinks look ghastly.
If swamp sludge green is more your speed, take a tip from www.marthastewart.com and make a drink with a moss-colored health juice mixture, add tequila and lime, and dust the edges of the glass with filé or green tea powder.
Or if you prefer blood red drinks, you can’t go wrong with the classic Bloody Mary, already equipped with its gory name. Or just throw cranberry juice and vodka in a punch bowl and throw in plastic bugs or gummy worms. Grenadine or pomegranate juice will do the trick, too. Drinks based on hibiscus, like the deep red rum-laced Jamaican sorrel, will do, too, as will Spanish sangría, a word related to sangre (blood).
Of course red wine is as blood red as it gets and in many circles more popular than strong cocktails. Steam off the label and stick on your own, computer-made if you can, with ghoulish fonts spelling creepy names like Serpent’s Spit or Kiss of the Devil.
A bigger bowl filled with dry ice for a foggy effect outside your punch bowl makes the contents look more potent. Or add a clean glow stick. Green-tinged water-filled gloves that have been frozen and the gloves peeled off make great ice cubes. Or fill regular ice cube trays with tiny plastic spiders.
Look up Halloween drinks online like Corpse Reviver, Bloody Brew, Brain Hemorrhage, Massacre, Red Death, Vampire's Kiss or the Blood Sucker, complete with red globules floating in it. Or just serve mulled cider or tea if that’s more your style.
For kids’ parties, or for the less sophisticated kids-at-heart among us (I count myself in that category), the possibilities for crazy Halloween foods are endless. Although kids are happy with just a big pile of plain old candy, it’s fun to invent spooktacular treats that go beyond merely calling guacamole “slime,” chicken wings “bat wings” or any old rice casserole “____ with maggots.”
Savory dishes in the theme could be bats and moths made of poppy-seed encrusted puff pastry or biscuit dough, cut into shapes and filled with cold cuts or mini-hot dogs. Or wrap regular-size hot dogs with strips of croissant dough for little mummies. Make little Frankensteins out of hard cooked eggs cut on the bottom to stand upright, a tomato slice in the middle, olive pieces for eyes, a peppercorn nose, parsley hair and clove bolts. Make wizard hats by rolling up a 2” piece of Slim Jim partway in a crescent dinner rolls, sprinkling dried basil on the remaining unrolled triangle and decorating the hats with pepperoni moons. Make witches fingers out of strips of breaded chicken or breadstick dough, sliced almonds or halved black olives making the witchy fingernails.
Tasty “mummy-rag soup” is made with chicken, broth and egg whites. Tomato soup can be a spider’s lair by running a knife from the middle of the bowl outwards though concentric circles of cream piped onto the soup’s surface. Stuff hollowed out baked potatoes with sauced spaghetti for “brains on the half skull.”
Make eyeballs by fitting pimento-stuffed olives into meatballs, or with grated cheese-based dough with the olive baked in. For sweeter orbs, mix peanut butter and powdered sugar and roll into balls with M & M irises, maybe adding some piped red veins for effect. Or make scoops of whipped topping and freeze them on a cookie sheet, with a strategically placed blueberry in each one.
For sweets, all manner of creepy crawly creatures can be made sweet. Peanut butter sandwich cookies dipped in white chocolate with two mini chocolate chip eyes make cute ghosts. You can make a cake in the form of any frightening creature: two Bundt cakes sliced in half and arranged in an “S” forms a fine snake, with slivered pine nuts for teeth, candy corn scales and a strip of artfully carved red fruit roll-up for a tongue. All kinds of tarantulas and spiders, from cuddly to terrifying, can be made with cakes, cookies, licorice, pretzels and much more.
You can make a haunted house of gingerbread, Oreo-crumb “dirt” with gummy worms coming out of it or serve sugared Grape Nuts cereal and Tootsie Rolls in a new cat litter box. Make your own swamp with a goldfish bowl filled with enough blue and yellow Jell-O to make a boggy green. Before it sets completely, add drained fruit cocktail for swamp debris, bits of frisee or radicchio and a very clean little plastic skeleton or toy car.
Food items are handy for non-edible Halloween fun as well. Set the table with filthy torn sheets and label everything: Vienna sausage “fingers” in a baby food jar, tarantula tacos, hand and cheese sandwich, French flies (plastic flies) and a "manburger" made of “ground Chuck (R.I.P.).” Make mystery boxes: have guests stick their hesitant hands into buckets or boxes covered with fake cobwebs to obscure what’s inside. Coat these things with oil to feel slimier and label them or tell guests what they are: bones (carrots or cleaned chicken bones), fingers (string cheese sticks or mini-carrots), hair (corn silk or old doll or wig hair), brains (tofu with edges rounded off, spaghetti squash or wide noodles—maybe bucatini or udon, which also stand in for worms), eyeballs (peeled grapes, olives, small hard-boiled eggs or cocktail onions), intestines (wet cold spaghetti), liver (half a canned peach), kidneys (peeled orange sections), heart (Jell-O cut into shape), skin (a lightly oiled flour tortilla) and teeth (unpopped popcorn).
Celebrate this most fun of holidays with the silliest, spookiest dishes, edible or not, that you can dream up.
I love Halloween because I have an excuse to act like a kid and do wild outrageous things. I can dress up, Sybil-like, as one of my assortment of alter egos: witch, housewife, Cleopatra, Count Dracula or swamp queen. I can cook crazy things like gelatin brains or eyeballs made of cheese and make people eat them.
But Halloween is a holiday probably more concerned with body parts than food parts, as it thrills us with its hint of taboo. We love to shock, scare, creep out and freak out ourselves and each other, via props, costumes or party offerings. We celebrate Halloween to remind ourselves that although life is folding up and preparing to hibernate for the winter, we’re still alive, wildly and crazily alive, compared to the un-dead characters we like to dress up as. The need to forget about the chill of winter and distract ourselves by concentrating on ghoulishness is an ageless feeling that we’ve known since pre-Christian Celts celebrated Samhain, an annual new year’s festival when people mingled with dead souls, the precursor, before many alternations, to our modern Halloween.
Although my children are too young yet for the type of frightful fête I’d love to throw, I’ve been planning it for years now, collecting books, magazines and computer files with ideas for scary, gross, or just plain silly decorations, party games and foods. You can cheat and give creepy names to what you serve for Halloween; just insert “Monster” or “Haunted” in front of the name of the dish. In Philadelphia, near the Halloween exhibit Terror Behind the Walls, held at the defunct Eastern State Penitentiary where Al Capone once dwelled, participating restaurants offer “Fright and a Bite” packages, with dishes like “Slithery Papardelle Pasta with Plenty of Mushrooms Picked from the Graveyard,” “Roasted, Toasted and Tortured Chestnut Soup,” “Cemetery Greens Tossed with a Bloody Vinaigrette” or “Pan Seared and Whipped Beyond Consciousness 8 oz. Filet Mignon with Whipped and Sternly Questioned Yukon Gold Potato.”
But to create dishes so that the food itself truly evokes Halloween, whether by its colors or resemblance to body parts, takes more planning. For starters, offer pumpkin seeds and label them witches’ teeth, or fingernails, roasting them during the party so guests can inhale the evocative aroma. Make your deviled eggs truly devilish by cracking the shells lightly after boiling and soaking them in strong tea to give them a ghastly hue, before stuffing with a extra spicy filling and topping the filling with tiny pepper triangles to simulate the devil’s horns and goatee.
Festive for Halloween is anything baked in a pumpkin, whose flesh is scooped out with the food as it’s served. It can be a hearty soup, chili, stew or a mix of seasoned ground meats. Or you can just cook your dish in a regular saucepot and serve it in small individual raw scooped out pumpkins. You can toss black squid ink pasta with an orange bell pepper sauce, cook rice with carrots and black olives, or stuff quesadillas with drained black beans, orange cheese and orange peppers, adding fresh cilantro and sautéed garlic and onion for added zest. Make an Indian-inspired shrimp sauté deep yellow with saffron or turmeric and sprinkle it with nigella or black sesame seeds. Consider a large rat made out of ground meatloaf mix, or go beyond just serving ribs with a cute Halloween-y name to actually arraying them like a human ribcage, with a whole red pepper in the middle to look like a heart, a sharp knife jutting out of it.
Halloween parties for grown-ups aren’t complete without creepy cocktails or punches. Lychees stuffed with a blueberry look like eyeballs when dropped in drinks, fake eyeballs of all kinds being a Halloween party classic. You can serve straight black Sambuca or make drinks with black vodka, like martinis with jalapeño-stuffed black olives. A combo of blue Curacao and pomegranate juice is said to turn any drink black, or try blue food coloring with orange liqueur. You can drop a scoop of ice cream in a Black Russian and call it a ghost. Cassis, a black currant liqueur, makes drinks dark as night too, and splashes of black currant nectar help make drinks look ghastly.
If swamp sludge green is more your speed, take a tip from www.marthastewart.com and make a drink with a moss-colored health juice mixture, add tequila and lime, and dust the edges of the glass with filé or green tea powder.
Or if you prefer blood red drinks, you can’t go wrong with the classic Bloody Mary, already equipped with its gory name. Or just throw cranberry juice and vodka in a punch bowl and throw in plastic bugs or gummy worms. Grenadine or pomegranate juice will do the trick, too. Drinks based on hibiscus, like the deep red rum-laced Jamaican sorrel, will do, too, as will Spanish sangría, a word related to sangre (blood).
Of course red wine is as blood red as it gets and in many circles more popular than strong cocktails. Steam off the label and stick on your own, computer-made if you can, with ghoulish fonts spelling creepy names like Serpent’s Spit or Kiss of the Devil.
A bigger bowl filled with dry ice for a foggy effect outside your punch bowl makes the contents look more potent. Or add a clean glow stick. Green-tinged water-filled gloves that have been frozen and the gloves peeled off make great ice cubes. Or fill regular ice cube trays with tiny plastic spiders.
Look up Halloween drinks online like Corpse Reviver, Bloody Brew, Brain Hemorrhage, Massacre, Red Death, Vampire's Kiss or the Blood Sucker, complete with red globules floating in it. Or just serve mulled cider or tea if that’s more your style.
For kids’ parties, or for the less sophisticated kids-at-heart among us (I count myself in that category), the possibilities for crazy Halloween foods are endless. Although kids are happy with just a big pile of plain old candy, it’s fun to invent spooktacular treats that go beyond merely calling guacamole “slime,” chicken wings “bat wings” or any old rice casserole “____ with maggots.”
Savory dishes in the theme could be bats and moths made of poppy-seed encrusted puff pastry or biscuit dough, cut into shapes and filled with cold cuts or mini-hot dogs. Or wrap regular-size hot dogs with strips of croissant dough for little mummies. Make little Frankensteins out of hard cooked eggs cut on the bottom to stand upright, a tomato slice in the middle, olive pieces for eyes, a peppercorn nose, parsley hair and clove bolts. Make wizard hats by rolling up a 2” piece of Slim Jim partway in a crescent dinner rolls, sprinkling dried basil on the remaining unrolled triangle and decorating the hats with pepperoni moons. Make witches fingers out of strips of breaded chicken or breadstick dough, sliced almonds or halved black olives making the witchy fingernails.
Tasty “mummy-rag soup” is made with chicken, broth and egg whites. Tomato soup can be a spider’s lair by running a knife from the middle of the bowl outwards though concentric circles of cream piped onto the soup’s surface. Stuff hollowed out baked potatoes with sauced spaghetti for “brains on the half skull.”
Make eyeballs by fitting pimento-stuffed olives into meatballs, or with grated cheese-based dough with the olive baked in. For sweeter orbs, mix peanut butter and powdered sugar and roll into balls with M & M irises, maybe adding some piped red veins for effect. Or make scoops of whipped topping and freeze them on a cookie sheet, with a strategically placed blueberry in each one.
For sweets, all manner of creepy crawly creatures can be made sweet. Peanut butter sandwich cookies dipped in white chocolate with two mini chocolate chip eyes make cute ghosts. You can make a cake in the form of any frightening creature: two Bundt cakes sliced in half and arranged in an “S” forms a fine snake, with slivered pine nuts for teeth, candy corn scales and a strip of artfully carved red fruit roll-up for a tongue. All kinds of tarantulas and spiders, from cuddly to terrifying, can be made with cakes, cookies, licorice, pretzels and much more.
You can make a haunted house of gingerbread, Oreo-crumb “dirt” with gummy worms coming out of it or serve sugared Grape Nuts cereal and Tootsie Rolls in a new cat litter box. Make your own swamp with a goldfish bowl filled with enough blue and yellow Jell-O to make a boggy green. Before it sets completely, add drained fruit cocktail for swamp debris, bits of frisee or radicchio and a very clean little plastic skeleton or toy car.
Food items are handy for non-edible Halloween fun as well. Set the table with filthy torn sheets and label everything: Vienna sausage “fingers” in a baby food jar, tarantula tacos, hand and cheese sandwich, French flies (plastic flies) and a "manburger" made of “ground Chuck (R.I.P.).” Make mystery boxes: have guests stick their hesitant hands into buckets or boxes covered with fake cobwebs to obscure what’s inside. Coat these things with oil to feel slimier and label them or tell guests what they are: bones (carrots or cleaned chicken bones), fingers (string cheese sticks or mini-carrots), hair (corn silk or old doll or wig hair), brains (tofu with edges rounded off, spaghetti squash or wide noodles—maybe bucatini or udon, which also stand in for worms), eyeballs (peeled grapes, olives, small hard-boiled eggs or cocktail onions), intestines (wet cold spaghetti), liver (half a canned peach), kidneys (peeled orange sections), heart (Jell-O cut into shape), skin (a lightly oiled flour tortilla) and teeth (unpopped popcorn).
Celebrate this most fun of holidays with the silliest, spookiest dishes, edible or not, that you can dream up.
