Halloween

Ah, Halloween. Such a great holiday on it's own, on top of kicking off the Holiday Season.

The holiday weekend kicked off with my work party. I love potlucks where people take great pride in what they bring. You have never seen so much food in your life! I made a giant candy corn cupcake cake for my contribution.



We started the holiday proper with the annual Pumpkin run, and reminisced about the previous years when 3.1 miles seemed like crossing a continent. Even though a 5k has become a "light" run for me these days, I didn't feel so great that morning. I still did extremely well, but I missed my PR and 3rd place in my age division by five seconds. Ouch.

In fact, I'm sort of embarrassed about it. First, that I didn't keep up my continuous improvement. And then second, that I was upset about my time at all. Four years ago, breaking 30 minutes was my ultimate running goal. This year I did 27:53. The lesson here is to make this motivate me to work harder for next year!

Afterward, we had some celebratory pumpkin spice lattes and finished setting up the house for wine and Halloween candy tasting. It was a spur of the moment idea, and it came out well!


Even though the day was supposed to be about candy, I made a veggie platter and bruschetta. I'm happy to say while there was candy left over, the healthy stuff was gone! I have such smart friends. I also made popcorn balls and apple chips, although these were both fails. The apple chips were in the oven nearly all day, and never quite got crispy. The popcorn balls turned into a solid ball when I put them in a bowl; I didn't have a candy thermometer to check the temperature. But I'm sure these will appear in the future - they were much easier to make than anticipated!

When it got dark, we handed out candy to the neighborhood kids. My favorites were the under-five set; you can immediately tell they don't know what's going on yet, and they're not sure if they want to be a part of it. Too cute! We gave out candy until we ran out, except I discovered another two bags today! Those will have to go to the Operation Gratitude drive.

I used leftover cake batter from the cupcake cake to send candy corn cupcakes to work with the husband. From what I hear, they went over pretty well. And they do look rather cute, if I do say so myself.


I hope your Halloween was fun, happy, and safe! Now, on to Thanksgiving. I can't wait!

Party Ideas

A while back, we had a little get together at our house. I don't want to call it a party, so we'll just leave it at that.

There were a lot of people, so we just got one of those giant sandwich trays from Costco. Love those, by the way. They're always a win.

Now, no event at my house is complete without me cooking something.

Bread is pretty simple to make, believe it or not, so I made a couple of loaves with garlic mixed in, and topped with tomatoes and olives to serve with cheese. Yum. Too bad no one really liked olives.
Then I had the creative idea to serve a simple, easy, but unique dessert. Smores!

Yes, I know most of the fun of these is getting to play with fire in a semi-dangerous situation, but it was mid-day and there were a lot of people. And yes, these are just marshmallows dipped in chocolate and rolled in crushed up graham crackers. And ... they sort of look like little mushrooms. Which would be cute for a garden themed party right?

But I swear I set out a couple of plates of these (LOTS of marshmallows) and they were all gone.

Oven Fries

I try, very hard actually, to eat well. Stick to healthy food, more vegetables than cookies, easy on the meat and carbs.

But we went to BJ's. I had chili, which was good, but other people had fries. French fries!! Rolled in trans fats and dipped in MSG!

As soon as we walked in the door I started chopping potatoes, without any real direction.

I'll guess I cooked these until crispy-looking at 350 degrees. With Lawry's salt and ketchup.


Why don't I make these more often?

Halloween Cake

This Halloween was totally awesome. Hectic, but awesome.

Friday night I stayed home to get the house in order, and put the finishing decorations on the cake. The preparation ended up more work than I expected, but it was worth it.

Saturday morning was the Pumpkin Run. I'll be the first to admit: I didn't want to be there. It was early, cold, I'm out of shape (with a few extra self-conscious pounds to prove it), and far enough for me to worry that we wouldn't have enough time to get cleaned up. I was not pleasant.

It ended up I ran faster than I ever have. My time was a boggling 28:37. Under 30 minutes!! I'm crediting the local hills, since the path was fairly flat. I think I scared the spectators toward the finish line after I saw the clock and hauled it across the finish line (but for the record, the clock was under 28 minutes when I crossed). You can read more about it here.

We came home, got cleaned up, and started partying. People came and went as they pleased, but I loved having everyone over. Where's this cake, you ask?


Of course, everything was edible. I used the doll cake pan to make the "hill." The fences were pretzels stuck together with chocolate. The tree was just chocolate chips melted in a pastry bag and squeezed out onto a sheet of wax paper. The same chocolate (Albertson's brand chocolate chips, to be exact) held together the graham cracker coffin. And if you look closely, you can see the green fingers creeping out. The tombstones were fun-size Heath bars, cut in half, and decorated with white frosting. Oh, and the dark gravelly road? Crushed Teddy Grahams. They were cheaper than regular graham crackers, albeit disturbing to crush up. The cake was chocolate, like dirt, according to my husband. Oh and those pumpkin spice kisses? Nasty. Just FYI.

I also roasted pumpkin seeds from our carved pumpkins. Thirty minutes at 375 degrees, coated in cooking spray and Lawry's salt. I roasted almonds in cinnamon sugar at the same time, but really that's not the right method. I should have melted the sugar and cinnamon in a little butter on the stove. Que sera.

We had an evening of trick or treaters. My favorites were the toddlers who, at the start of the night, didn't quite understand what was happening, but by the end of the night were totally in to getting candy from the strange lady who was oh so excited to see them. Cute.

Thank goodness Sunday was daylight savings day. We needed the break!

Pitas and Hummus

It's two for one!

I needed something to take to a picnic besides some ribs. I'd been meaning to make hummus out of the two cans of chickpeas in the cabinet, and to try making bread on the stove. This seemed like as good an opportunity as any! Obviously it's easier to make a simple appetizer from scratch than to spend $5 at the grocery store.

Our grocery store just started carrying pitas in the last year. In fact, they now have a little shelving section to all different kinds of flatbreads. But I'd seen this article on baking without the oven after watching a silly video of a man making English muffins on an iron in a hotel room. Did this actually work?

While the (whole wheat!) pita dough was rising, I got to work making hummus. Hummus is one of those foods that you shouldn't use a recipe to make. I loosely based mine off of this recipe, but after a long and bitter battle with the food processor, I really don't know how much I ended up putting in aside from two cans of chickpeas and 1/3 cup of almonds.

That's right. No tahini. Just almonds on hand. Tahini is just sesame seeds whipped in to a paste, so it stood to reason another nut could stand in. There's a wealth of information on the internet about tahini substitutions. It worked out just fine. Over-filling the food processor did not work out as fine.

There was plenty of extra-light olive oil involved. Hm, I wonder how butter or margarine would fare?

Embarrassingly, it took probably about an hour to get the hummus blended. The dough hadn't really risen much, but it was time to get cooking anyway. I'm starting to wonder, though, if my yeast is too old. Or if it just didn't have enough power to lift up the wheat flour, which seems extra heavy to me. Regardless, I pressed out six inch flat rounds and threw them in a pan in some olive oil cooking spray. They didn't puff up, but they did cook in about a minute in a half on each side as advertised.

Whatever. It came out tasting good. And even though there were leftovers, I'd say they went over with the crowd pretty well.

Very, very simple. And it's pretty Martha to show up at a picnic saying "Oh, I just made some pitas and hummus to bring this afternoon."