At The Last Minute…..

….I pulled together a pretty quick and easy Halloween dinner.  (it’s become something of a tradition around here.  Click here to see past meals.)

This year I browsed the internet and found some pretty easy ideas from a number of places.  Without further ado, here we go!

Halloween Pumpkins

Ingredients:

Sweet potatoes, butter, salt

Directions:

Wash your sweet potatoes.  Prick them all over with a fork and place them in a baking dish.  Bake in the oven at 400 degrees until a fork inserted into them goes through easily (about an hour). Take them out and let them cool.  I sliced mine open lengthwise to help speed that up.  Once they’ve cooled, scoop out the insides and mash in a bowl with some butter and salt.  Using your hands, form small, pumpkin shapes out of the sweet potato.

Add something green (I used broccoli stems) as a stem.  Step back and look how cute…

Jack O Lanterns

Ingredients

White rice, orange or carrot juice, olives or nori, salt, cheddar cheese

Directions:

Combine the rice (I used abrorio because it was the only white rice I had.  Apparently we’ve become a quinoa and brown rice family) with the correct amount of liquid in a pan or rice cooker.  I used one cup of rice and two cups of liquid.  Some of the liquid should be the carrot juice (I used carrot orange because I couldn’t bear to spend $7 on a gallon of carrot juice when I knew we wouldn’t use it and the small bottles were a carrot orange mix.  I think all carrot would be brighter.)– if you don’t mind the taste of carrots, go for all carrot juice for the liquid.  Cook the rice and then set it aside to cool.

I mixed in about a half a cup of shredded cheddar cheese with mine, along with some salt  While it’s cooling, cut face shapes out of your olives or your nori.

With damp hands, form pumpkin balls out of the rice.  Then place your face shapes on top. Add a green something for a stem– again, I used broccoli stems.

Creepy Forrest

Ingredients

Broccoli

Directions

Wash your broccoli and slice into tree sizes.

Cook any way you like (I generally steam or boil) until crisp tender– that is, still bright green and crispy.  I stood mine up in some of the extra rice and convinced the kids that they were giants eating tiny trees.  Hey, whatever works, right?

Mummy Dogs

Ingredients:

crescent roll dough or puff pastry

hot dogs

mustard

Directions

Roll out your dough so that it is thin (not so thin that you see through it but somewhere between a 1/4 and 1/8 inch).

Slice it into ribbons.

Prick your hot dog a few times.  Wrap the dough ribbons around the hot dog, making sure to connect them to each other at the ends.  Set aside one square or roll.

Repeat until all hot dogs are covered, placing them on a baking sheet once wrapped.

Use the leftover pieces that you set aside to make the hat/head bandages.

Bake according to dough package directions (mine was 350 degrees, about 8-10 minutes).  Let them cool and then add eyes using a dab of mustard.  I used a toothpick to place my eyes.

Happy Halloween!!!