To paraphrase the words of an old song, “Fall is in the air, I can feel it, fall is in the air, I can tell”! I can tell, even in our hot central Texas climate. There is just something about the shortening of the days, the later sunrises and the earlier sunsets, and especially how the air feels in the mornings.
This time of year makes me think about all the holidays and festivities we celebrate between now and the New Year. Each celebration has its own assortment of food connected with it. I am already thinking of what I will be cooking and serving in November and December. Halloween is always associated with lots of candy, so a problem we adults face is how to weave some healthy magic into all the sweets.
Last year, with school via Zoom, the Covid-19 pandemic raging, and no immunizations yet available, celebrating Halloween posed a real problem for my daughter with two grammar school-aged children. The question was how to make Halloween both fun and safe, and possibly healthy. In the end, the children said that their Halloween was the best one they had ever had. Isn’t that music to a mother’s ears!
My daughter planned a day of fun for the children. She printed out a Halloween Schedule of Events for each child that looked like an invitation.
The morning started with carving pumpkins outdoors (fortunately, it was a lovely day) to be used later as part of the dining room decorations. After lunch, a neighbor had arranged for a Mr. Softee truck to come to the neighborhood to provide treats for the neighborhood children, a fun dessert. After the tasty treat, everyone watched a Halloween movie – not too spooky as the children are just in grammar school. A festive and inventive dinner party followed the movie.
I helped my daughter decorate the dining room in orange and black. We cut black plastic bags into streamers and hung them across the archway between the living room and the dining room; they were such fun to walk through. The pumpkins the children carved were placed on the buffet with votive candles inside them. Orange marigolds placed within a jack-o’-lantern, Halloween placemats, and lots of votive candles decorated the dining room table. The table just sparkled.
The Spooky Dinner Party was great fun. We had stuffed peppers carved to resemble jack-o’-lanterns, each one of them slightly different. The filling was picadillo (found here) mixed with 1/8 cup of cooked brown rice (but you could use cooked farro, barley, or quinoa, or a mixture of these), the filled peppers cooked in a 350-degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes, just long enough to soften the peppers a bit.
Mummies were made with partially cooked large carrots with arms and legs cut and wrapped in crescent roll dough, then baked according to the directions on the crescent dough package. By the way, I was able to find crescent dough in sheet form this year. That would make it easier to wrap, as you would only have to cut the dough into the size strips you want.
We cut the vegetables into Halloween shapes; beets cut into witches’ hats, cucumbers and peeled zucchini cut as ghosts, large carrot slices and cantaloupe into jack-o’-lanterns. We also had a cold vegetable plate and hummus dip with the vegetables arranged to represent a skeleton and hummus dip for the face. As we both have standard poodles, I made one to resemble a poodle. In a previous blog, I gave a hummus recipe, and you can also find some very good hummus recipes in “The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet” by Rip Esselstyn.
Following dinner, there was a scavenger hunt, with clues in the house and in the yard. The hunt was the hit of the day! If we could have done anything better, it would have been to offer more clues to make the scavenger hunt last longer. It culminated in the back yard with me as a witch, in a black caftan and big witches’ hat, hiding (with candy treats) and cackling (a skill that I have developed over many Halloweens), and my daughter as a ghost with a white clay masque on her face and wrapped in an old white quilt. She was quite a sight! The children were delighted, and we were able to carry this day out with a minimum amount of sweets and no potential exposure to Covid-19. We are really going to have to put our thinking caps on if we are to exceed last year’s festivities.
In the meantime, I hope what we did to make Halloween healthy, and a lot of fun will give you ideas about how you, too, can celebrate this fun holiday with your family.
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