Scary Dinner

I love Halloween.  The candy, the costumes, the chance to make your food fun.  This year for dinner we had Eyeball Soup, Pumpkin Grilled Cheese, Worms and Dirt, Spiderweb Eggs and Ghastly Ghosts.  Mmmmmm.  The best part?  After dinner we took the toddler trick or treating- and she actually SAID “trick or treat!”

Scary Dinner 2011

Eyeball Soup

Based on this martha stewart recipe.

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped

3 tablespoons butter

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 cans crushed tomatoes

1 quart chicken broth

salt, pepper, oregano, basil (to taste)

1-2 cups half and half, milk, or cream

small balls of fresh mozzarella

several olives stuffed with pimento

Directions:

Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat.  Add the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is soft but not brown.  Don’t let the garlic burn.  Add the tomatoes and then the broth.  Stir and let it warm up.  Add the spices, turn the heat down to a simmer and let it cook for about 45 minutes.  (I did all of this ahead and let it sit in the fridge overnight)

Let it cool a little bit and then run it through the blender in batches until it’s smooth.  Or use a stick blender in the pot (won’t get as smooth but if you’re not Martha Stewart, you might not care).  Return to the heat and slowly whisk in the dairy (milk, cream, whatever). It will lighten it up and you can do this to taste as well.  Let it sit on low heat while you make the eyeballs.

Slice your olives into thirds.  Make sure to keep the pimento intact.

Using a small melon baller- or maybe a tiny spoon?-  scoop out a little bit of the mozzarella ball.

Place the third-ed olive into the dent left in the cheese and you’ll have some eyeballs.

You could even have a whole plate of them, just staring at you.

Float them in the soup after you ladle it into bowls.  Creepy.

We served this with grilled cheese pumpkins- just cut the pumpkin shape out before you grill the bread.

We also had spiderweb eggs, from this Martha Stewart recipe.  It’s a clever idea but since I don’t peel eggs well, I delegated that task to the husband. Who discovered that they don’t peel easily and also look better when you leave on the membrane.  Ick. I couldn’t get a really good photo of these but they were pretty neat.

Finally, we had worms in dirt, again, thanks to Martha Stewart.  It’s basically canned black beans, heated and chopped and then hot dogs boiled and arranged.  Still, sort of fun.  Just make sure you cut your hot dogs thin enough.  Start by cutting them in half.

Then cut them in slices- if you’re really careful, you could probably get about four from each half.  I was not careful and ended up with odd numbers. Mine were also a little thick.

Throw these into a pot of boiling water and when they start to curl, take them out.  Spread your black beans on a plate and then arrange the hot dog worms to look like they’re squirming and moving around all over.

Mmmm.  Dirt.

We ended our dinner with ghastly ghost cookies served in a makeshift chocolate pot de creme- I had to use up the egg yolks left from making the meringues.

And because you can’t have Halloween without a costume, here’s the toddler:

Happy Halloween!

Halloweeeeeeeen…..

Clearly, as it’s Halloween RIGHT NOW, I haven’t yet made my scary dinner.  I did some prep work yesterday but the majority of the food happens tonight.  However, I thought I’d get you in the mood with a dessert recipe, just in case you’re stuck for something tonight.  This one is pretty quick and effective. A few thoughts:

1.  When you’re piping them, don’t use a decorative tip.  Use a smooth one.

2.  Also, make sure your ghosts stand straight up.  Mind tended to lean which, while appropriate for Passover, was less appealing for Halloween.

3.  Mine needed to bake longer than the recommended 75 minutes, more around an hour and thirty or forty minutes.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps my eggs were really moist.

4.  For the record, I actually hate meringues.  But other people seem to enjoy them.

Ghastly Ghosts (from Food Network)

Ingredients

3 large egg whites

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

3/4 cup white sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In the bowl of an electric mixer with a whip attachment, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar and vanilla until frothy.  Beat in the sugar and increase the speed to high.  Beat until stiff peaks form- it should take six or seven minutes.

Place the mixture into a piping bag with a large, plain tip.  Or use a ziplock bag with the tip cut off.  Either way, roll up your sleeves because this is a messy, sticky project.  Pipe the batter out in swirls that top each other, sort of piling circles on circles.  Sadly, it will look a little bit like white dog poo.  (Not a comparison you want to make with food, but there it is.)   It should make about 8-10.

Bake for an hour to an hour and forty minutes- the cookies will sort of dry out and crack a little bit.  Let them cool completely.

Melt the chocolate chips in a small bowl it  the microwave.  I did it in 30 second intervals and stirred in between.  It took only a  minute.  Pour the chocolate into a small ziplock bag and cut a very tiny hole in the edge.  Pipe on the eyes to make your white mountains/piles of white dog poo into ghastly ghosts.  They’ll actually be kind of cute.