Spooky Halloween Dinner

We celebrated Halloween this year by having a spooky dinner. I set up a place for my husband and I at the table and gave him this menu.

I brought out the food in courses.

Witches Brew:

I found these plastic cups at Winco and filled them with bright green soda. I hung a gummy worm over the side.

 Cobweb Dip with Ghost Bites:

I combined dry french onion soup mix with sour cream and green food coloring to make up the base of the dip. Then, I piped circles of sour cream and used a toothpick to form the spiderweb.

The ghost chips were cutouts from a tortilla that I baked. I used an edible ink pen to highlight the faces I carved out.

Salad:

The leaves from the "dark forest" were romaine lettuce leaves. I used apples for the "poisoned apples" and tented poppy seed dressing with green food coloring to make up the "green goblin dressing."

Cat Croutons:

The cat croutons were a little trickier to make. I traced a cat image onto paper from an image on my computer screen, then I cut the cat image out, placed it on top of a piece of rye bread and cut around it with a knife. I baked the bread until it was toasted. My inspiration for the cat croutons came from this site.

 Stuffed Jack O'Lantern

My Mom has a wonderful recipe for stuffed acorn squash that I decided to modify and bake in a pumpkin. I've included the recipe I used below...

Filling:

I baked the pumpkins for 30 min at 350 degrees. Then stuffed them with the filling recipe below and cooked them for an additional 10 minutes.

Filling
1 cup dry wild rice
1 beef  bouillon cube
3 stalks celery
1/2 cup onion
1 cup cream of mushroom soup
1/4 pound turkey sausage
1/4 pound turkey burger
s/p to taste

Bring 3 cups of water to a boil, add bouillon cube and rice. Turn the heat down to low and it let simmer for 45-60 minutes. Cook meat and set aside. Stir fry chopped celery and onion in oil until semi tender. Combine all ingredients and heat through. Stuff in pumpkin. I used an edible ink pen to make the jack o'lantern face on the outside.

Monster Bones:

I served garlic bread in the shape of bones for the "monster bones." The bread recipe I used came from this site. I omitted the bacon.

 Graveyard Pudding:

For dessert, I served chocolate pudding with crushed oreos and a vanilla waffer "gravestone" in a parfait cup. I added a few Halloween candies that I got in the bulk at Winco.

 Chocolate Bat:
I used a lindt chocolate truffle to make up the bat base and attached chocolate wings (that I piped onto a silpat and let harden in the freezer) with chocolate.  The eyes were made of white chocolate.

Mummy:

I served the dessert with a mummy spoon. I got the idea for the spoon from this site.

Here is a close up. I used white chocolate to make the mummy and semi sweet chocolate for the eyes.

I had my husband read off each course from the menu before I brought it out. It was fun to hear and see his reaction to the dinner, throughout our date.  If I were to do it again, I would set the table up to be a little spookier and I would have played Halloween music.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Italian Themed Dates

My husband and I went to Italy a few years ago and I wanted to recreate parts of our trip at home. So I organized three dinner dates, one for each city we visited.

Venice:

My favorite dish, on our trip, was the bacon carbonara I had in Venice. The smoky salty flavor from the bacon was so good infused in the cream. I decided to recreate this dish for our date. Here's a recipe that tastes just like the one I had there.
For dessert, I made the popular fisherman's bread cookies sold there. The chocolate ones are called moretti and the pistachio cookies are called pan pistacchio. I added to this recipe. See details below...

Chocolate cookie - I added 1/4 cup cocoa powder and reduced the flour by 3 Tbsp. I added 1/2 cup of chocolate chips and omitted the nuts/fruit. The cookies bake in 15 min at 350 degrees.
Pistachio cookie - I added a few drops of green food coloring to the batter, 1/4 cup coconut, and 1/2 cup chocolate chips instead of the fruit/nuts. I painted the outside of the cookie with green food coloring after it had finished baking and covered it in glaze.
Glaze - 1/4 cup honey, 2 Tbsp sugar. Heated.

 

Florence:

In Florence, we went to a sandwich shop that sold paninis. I recreated paninis at our house using this method . I filled the sandwiches with spinach and artichoke dip, roasted tomatoes and chicken.

For dessert, we had the popular street food in Florence, waffles with gelato (ice cream.) It was a pretty easy dessert to put together. I got pre-made waffles at Winco and snickers rocky road ice cream from Roths.

 

Rome:

We spent a little more time in Rome. It's a bigger city and there's a lot to see. When we got there, we were so hungry, that we ate at the first restaurant we could find. My husband ordered ravioli and they brought him out one big ravioli that was the size of a plate.

I decided to recreate that dish at home. I made two large ravioli's, boiled them in a sauce pan, and to my surprise, they held together and tasted great. 

For dessert, I made a baked version of cannoli's. I tried to make them look similar to one that I tried in Rome with pistachios. I think they turned out great. See recipe below...

I used a tuile recipe from this cookbook to make the cannoli's. I used my cannoli tubes to shape them. The ricotta filling recipe came from this site, but I left the candied fruit out.

 

Italian Music:

Here are some Italian songs that we listened to during our dates.
1.) Fascination
2.) Bella Notte
3.) Via Con Me

The Nightmare Before Christmas - Themed Date

Since it's getting close to Halloween, I thought it would be fun to have a "Nightmare Before Christmas" themed date.

First, I surprised my husband with these movie inspired snacks. I had the soundtrack playing in the background. Then, we watched our favorite parts of the movie.

Jack Skellington:

 The cupcakes had a chocolate base with peppermint whipped cream frosting. The marshmallow on top was held up by a toothpick. The neck decoration was a bag tie, cut up and painted with edible ink. My inspiration for the cupcakes came from these two sites - Blog #1, Blog #2.

Graveyard Dip:

The graveyard dip was french onion soup mix combined with sour cream. A dip that my husband and I both love. I used a little bit of food coloring to tent it yellow and an exacto knife to cut out the purple cabbage design. This idea is a spin off of this blogger's mashed potato art.

I found the Halloween tortilla chips aka fright bites at Winco. I was really impressed with them. The picture below is a close up of the Halloween images (bat, ghost, pumpkin) and colors of the chips.

Pumpkin Patch:

The pumpkin patch was made of chocolate pudding, cake crumbs, green colored coconut, and chocolate pumpkins.

Jack O'Lantern

I used edible ink and an orange to create this jack o'lantern. An idea that's been circulating on facebook and pinterest lately.

My husband was pretty impressed with the food/set up and we had fun watching clips of the movie. Here's a link to my favorite part.

Pumpkin Patch

Fall is here, back with it's familiar chill in the air and beautiful changing leaves.  My anticipation for the holidays and family traditions has really been growing lately.

One of our traditions, is to visit the pumpkin patch. Lucky for us, there are many to choose from.

It was our baby's first time going to the pumpkin patch this year, which added a lot to our excitement. We decided to go to Bauman Farms after hearing good reviews from friends.

First off, I'll just say that the place is huge. From the indoor stores to the outdoor play area. It is very well maintained too.

Inside, there is a large grocery store, gift shop, and nursery/garden center. I thought their apple cider slushys were pretty cool and festive.

 They had a big pumpkin on display in their gift shop that weighed 400 pounds.

We missed the pumpkin weigh off. It was scheduled for the next day. I guess the biggest pumpkin goes for thousands of dollars. Then, the seeds are sold for $100 each and everyone wants to buy them so they can have the biggest pumpkin next year, lol.

Outside there's a large playing area that could probably keep a kid(s) entertained all day. Most of the activities required a day pass (money), but the petting zoo was free.

I noticed this sign as we were walking around and thought it was funny. They do sell homemade doughnuts there.

 We saw a bouncy house and some other fun kid stuff too. I liked this pumpkin art.

I'm sure we'll go back to this pumpkin patch in the future. I'd recommend it and can see why other people do.

San Francisco Themed Date

My husband and I vacationed in San Francisco years ago and had so much fun there. We spent most of our time exploring the city. I'll never forget the spectacular views of the bay and city that we saw while hiking around and riding the trolly.

My favorite place in the city was fisherman's wharf. We ordered sourdough bread bowls with clam chowder there, which is a very touristy thing to do. Then we went to Ghirardelli square and got chocolate.

I wanted to recreate our San Francisco experience. So, I picked up sour dough bread bowls from Safeway and clam chowder from the "Word of Mouth Bistro."

I hadn't tried the restaurant's chowder before, but went with it after hearing/reading rave reviews. I was glad that I did my research, because it was probably the best chowder I could have found in Salem.

I found Ghirardelli products in the baking section at the store and decided to make brownie sundaes for dessert.

My husband entered the room after I had set the table and turned on the Tony Bennett song, "I left my heart in San Francisco."

We both enjoyed our dinner and San Francisco date. We reminisced about our time there and talked about future vacation plans. Then, we watched a movie.