Trick Or Treat
Halloween is over but you wouldn’t know it from driving by my house. The cobwebs are still up. No, not the ones that I need to vacuum from the ceiling from the real spiders but the ones all over my front porch. The pumpkins are still whole and waiting to be chopped up to be pumpkin soup, or maybe if I’m feeling really ambitious, pumpkin ravioli. The costume box is still in the living room and the candy, oh the candy, is too large a quantity to count.
We did have a great time celebrating the spookiest holiday of the year. Although we didn’t ever get around to carving our pumpkins I did make a couple of Halloween treats that I thought I would share. Those along with the photo’s of the Reoch’s in costume I know my mom is dying to see.
The first treat I made took some investigating and research. I signed up to bring fruit to Mile’s party this year. People, especially the schools around here are getting so sugar conscious. We were discouraged from bringing any candy or sweets to the party which was fine by me. They get enough Trick-or-Treating anyhow, but, that led me on a quest. How could I make “fruit” festive for Halloween. Luckily I came across a site that had a recipe that did the trick. It’s so simple and brilliant all at the same time. You take a bag of oranges, not too small and not too big, hallow them out just like you would carve a pumpkin and yes, paint a jack-o-lantern face on the front. Fill the hallowed out orange peel with chopped up fruit and voila! You have a mini jack-o-lantern fruit cup. SOOO cute! I used acrylic paint so that if the little one’s hands were wet it wouldn’t rub off. Everyone loved them. HUGE hit!
The other treat I made was for the party we went to Halloween night. I have a recipe book filled with ghoolish delights and the one I picked was Monster Fingers. You take a can of Pilsbury Bread Stick dough and lay the individual strips out. Lay skinny strips of ham and cheese with a little mustard if you want smeared on top of one of the sticks, take the other half of the dough stick and place on top, sealing the two halves together to make a “finger”. When you’ve filled all of them, take a sharp knife and without cutting all the way through the dough, make knuckles by slicing lines. To finish it off, mix the yolk of one egg with some green food coloring and make “finger nails” at one end. They turned out super cool and yummy. We wanted the fingers to feed more than 6 people so Matt had a great idea to cut the fingers in half and use red food coloring to make them look like they were bleeding. Oh they were gross but perfect!
Can you tell that we enjoy Halloween around here? I think it’s because there’s so much creativity flowing. People show up transformed to parties, sometimes unrecognizable. I get to make creepy things with food, decorate the porch and come up with costumes that are easy and fun. It’s all about easy around here these days. Anything too involved and it’s passed on before I can blink.
I guess I should take the decorations down soon. The parties are over, the costumes are back in the box and it’s time to start thinking about turkey’s and apple pie. Mmmmmmm….home made apple pie!
This year our costumes were pretty easy to figure out. Miles was a pirate. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a pirate or Spiderman but the sword tipped the scales. He was all about being a swash buckling pirate swinging his sword to steal the golden treasure. Mason and his borderline obsession with Star Wars narrowed down the field when we were choosing a costume. Obi Wan was the winner because both the costume fit and they had an Obi Wan light saber that lit up in the dark. Matt and I wanted easy but something that we could be together. In all my years of dressing up I’ve never been in costume as a “couple”! This year was great and when the boys were trick-or-treating, people loved that Matt and I were in costume too. I loved our look so much this may become the costume of choice for years to come!
