Thursday, October 17, 2013

A Halloween Dinner

Sorry for missing my usual Wednesday, but I had crazy amounts of grading! I'll make up for it by presenting an entire themed meal from 1974's Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: New Holiday Cookbook.

I am in a Halloween mood through the entire month of October (and September too!), so I hoped the trusty home ec teachers were open enough to include Halloween on the list of recipe-worthy holidays, and indeed they were! Let's start out with a nice salad:


This is just about a perfect representation of the food trends that amuse me to no end. It features a salad that glues fruits and veggies together with sweet gelatin. (Carrots sounds fine, but cabbage?) The gelatin is molded in a rather finicky way. (Let's balance cone-shaped glasses that someone has stolen from the office water cooler inside real glasses so we can use them as molds!) Once the cones are done, they're unmolded and used as centers to balance canned asparagus as the corn shocks. (Canned asparagus with lemon jello. Yay.) To top it all off, surround the tableau with tiny pumpkins molded from process cheese spread decorated with cloves and yellow food coloring.

That's a lot of labor for something that is bound to look adorable and taste revolting.

For the main course, I can't resist this recipe based on the title alone:


The beef is dressed in a pumpkin costume! This actually doesn't sound bad-- seasoned ground beef and vegetables baked and served in a pumpkin. This recipe even gets a picture so readers can see the beef all dressed up in its costume:


For dessert, we will have fudge. I've heard of a lot of variations: peanut butter, candy cane, cranberry, rocky road, cherry-vanilla, coffee. I even made Velveeta fudge once as a gag gift for a friend. (It was actually not bad, so the "gag" part of "gag gift" was surprisingly NOT literal.)

I had not, however, heard of this:


Carrot cake is fine, so carrot fudge might not be too bad. It will certainly be orange to go with the Halloween theme. I guess dessert is both a trick and a treat!

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