A Very Simple Spooky Supper

Halloween has always been one of my favorite secular holidays.  First there is the socially-sanctioned door-to-door panhandling for candy!  Then there are the costumes! (And especially amusing to me are the many Halloween puns you can throw around. I apologize for those in advance.)

We started having Halloween-themed dinner parties on the night of trick-or-treating for my daughter and her friends when she was in elementary school. I quickly realized these dinners didn’t require any complicated recipes or elaborate preparation.  It wasn’t really what I cooked, but what I called it.  Half of a hot dog baked in a crescent roll wrapper with a sliced almond inserted at one end?  A severed finger, of course! 

This blog post follows a recent Halloween dinner we hosted.  But full disclosure:  there are no real recipes presented.  So you can choose to go all gourmet or just go all grocery store.  I encourage you to follow Dr. Frankenstein's example:  acquire the parts and then assemble this beast of a meal.   

Whatever you do, be sure to print out the menu in a suitably creepy font, and let your guests read it before they begin goblin.  This meal was a wicked success, and I’m already thinking about next year.  Ghoulash perhaps?

A Very Simple but Spooky Supper

Appetizer

Booschetta with Spider Spread, Gangrene Paté & 

Crime Scene Chutney

Salad

Marinated Eyeballs, Toadstools & Goblin Tongues

on Ghostly Greens 

Entrée

Brains with Blood Sauce

Vegetable

Witches’ Teeth

Bread

Bone Breadsticks with Vampire Butter

Dessert

Swampy Graveyard Pudding

A terrifying trifecta

For the appetizer, I spread purchased crostini with a Boursin-type cheese, although plain spreadable cream cheese or goat cheese would have worked just as well.  Then I topped each piece with either olive tapenade (Spider Spread), basil pesto (Gangrene Paté), or tomato pesto (Crime Scene Chutney).  I had homemade basil pesto in the freezer, but the other two were purchased.  For drinks, I just served purchased sangria, but there are tons of Halloween cocktail recipes on the web.

A scary salad

The salad base consisted of some lightly dressed baby greens.  The Marinated Eyeballs were slices of small tomatoes (Campari or Roma are good) topped with a slice of cherry-sized mozzarella balls (called ciliegine) and then a sliced black olive.  I did drizzle the tomatoes with some balsamic glaze I had in the refrigerator, but just salt and pepper would have been fine. 

The Toadstools were—you guessed it—sliced mushrooms.  I marinated slices of button mushrooms for a couple of hours in a garlicky marinade, but you can find marinated mushrooms in some grocery store olive bars.  Even just presenting freshly sliced mushrooms with a drizzle of vinaigrette would do the trick. 

For the Goblin Tongues, I roasted red peppers in the oven, removed the charred skins (that even sounds creepy), sliced them and let them soak in a quick “bath” of balsamic vinegar.  Jarred roasted red peppers (large pieces), drained, rinsed, and “bathed” would make an easy substitute. 

An eerie entrée

Brains with Blood Sauce is obviously a tomato sauce on noodles.  I did make my sauce from scratch using Italian sausage as the meat—which looks pretty gory in the sauté stage.  With all the great spaghetti sauces on the grocery store shelf these days, homemade is not at all necessary, and other noodle options would look just as “brainy.”

So much decay

The vegetable was shamefully simple--just cooked frozen corn. But when you call the corn Witches’ Teeth, it’s hard to unsee that.

Butter beware

The breadsticks were straight from the Pillsbury tube.  I thought tying a knot at the end of each strip of dough would make them look more humerus (get it!?), but I got lazy, so I just twisted them per the package instructions.

However, the Vampire Butter did not suck!  I heated about 4 tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan until the milk solids were caramel colored.  Then I took the butter off the heat and added 1-2 cloves of minced garlic, poured the butter into a small ramekin and chilled it in the refrigerator.  Before serving the butter, I let it soften a bit at room temperature.  This is a recipe that will not be buried in my recipe files!

A fatal finale

The Swampy Graveyard Pudding is a variation of a standard Halloween dessert especially loved by children.  I decided to use (packaged) pistachio pudding instead of the usual chocolate—more swampy looking.  I pulverized quite a few Oreos in the food processor, filling and all, for the “soil" and layered the cookie crumbs and pudding parfait-style in glass dishes. I also poked a few gummi worms in each pudding before chilling them.  

The tombstones are Milano cookies with the RIP written in black cake decorating “writing gel.”  They were a little fussy to make, but I think they gave the puddings a certain grave-itas. (I’m sorry.)

I hope you enjoyed this menu walk-through. Have a spooktacular Halloween!