Saturday, October 28, 2006

Special Halloween Edition


Here is the "spooky dish" I created for today's Halloween party. Had a couple bags of ollalieberries in the freezer leftover from going to a U-pick this summer with the Hughes family (Popsey's sister and our niece and nephew). They gave us ALL the berries they picked because it didn't make sense to take them back to Idaho. Thanks Hugheses!

I was thinking the berries had some Halloween potential, since they have that bloody coloring. A blood and guts pie? Maybe with organs sticking out of it or something? Then had the realization that cutting gashes in the top could be made to look like wounds with blood ooking out, and even more so if I tied the wounds up with sutures.

Tying the sutures required about all the dexterity I could muster. I used food-grade kitchen string peeled off into thinner threads. I wasn't quite prepared enough and a medium sized basting needle was all I could find in my sewing stuff. Next time I'd use a larger hooked needle.

Dough recipes all say to refrigerate the dough at least an hour before filling and baking, but this always seems to cause the dough to get stiff and crumbly. This time after it was cold and I tried working with it, it started falling apart as usual. I ended up letting it sit out to soften, and even then having to roll it out again. Oh well. Every time this happens I tear my hair out trying to deal with it, not sure which is more frustrating: that it will be cardboard textured after all that work, or that I'm stressing out over a stupid pie crust. Then we can't even tell anything went wrong when we're eating it. So this time I just tried to relax and go with it.

Cutting eyes and a mouth into it were a last minute idea, and it was a stroke of luck when the berries ooked out of the mouth like a tongue. Had to restrain myself from looking in the oven every 10 minutes to check out the ookage.

3 comments:

  1. That’s one scary (and delicious) looking pie! What did you decide for a Halloween costume?

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  2. I still have a half hour or so to go, and haven't yet decided. Suffice it to say, it won't be too exciting.

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  3. My costume was so not worth a whole post. It was a kid party anyways, so the adult costumes were not the focus. I dug around in Popsey's closet and went for the "rancher" look. Of the few comments people bothered to make about my costume, the best was "Are you supposed to be Brokeback Mountain?" The hosting family was dressed in night-of-the-living dead costumes. I thought they looked cool, but one family had to leave because their children were too scared. Now that's a successful costume (though they felt bad).

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