FOOD

Here Kitty, Kitty

By Hyacinth Miles


As a kid I was always captivated by those “creative ideas” in magazines for making a really creepy Halloween party. I can’t really say why. They were always the sort of tips that involved a completely dark, silent room and a bunch of idiotically credulous people, which to me never sounded like a recipe for a killer party:

Fill a glove with cold mud and pass it around a dark room, trying to convince guests it’s a severed hand. Stick guest’s hands into a bowl of cold spaghetti and try to convince them it’s guts. (Sticking people’s hands in things seemed a staple of this sort of humor.) Stick people’s hands in a bowl of cold, peeled grapes and try to convince people that they are eyeballs.

Peeled grapes? Even as a child this flummoxed me. Who had time to peel grapes? Probably the sort of person who thought it would be a blast to sit silently in a dark room and pass wet, slimy food products around.

Well times have changed, and creepy treat suggestion for Halloween have become much more sophisticated, if no less juvenile. Now you can actually eat the horrible, disgusting things you prepare for your party. So leave the light on for these recipes, because this is the sort of food that bites back.

The recent Halloween mixer at work gave me an opportunity to browse some of the more choice new Halloween recipes. Mixers at my place of employment are cut-throat, competitive affairs, and last Thursday there was an unofficial competition to see who could come up with the most disgusting looking food. Who knew scientists could have this much fun?

There were a pretty simple ideas, brownies that looked like turds, (these went mostly uneaten), something called “Halloweeners” which were appropriately blood red and named by our pun crazy grad-student. She also dubbed my spinach and artichoke dip “mold and mildew sauce”, getting more excited about the name than I’m capable of getting about anything.

But others got more creative. There was a “grave-yard cake” which had little candy tombstones and the added joy of small rubber skeletons inside that you could find as you bit down, somewhat like the coin in the Christmas pudding. We didn’t set the cake on fire though.

My personal favorite was the kitty litter cake, served in a (hopefully unused) cat poop tray, and complete with little pieces of cat poo (melted tootsie rolls). As this easily won the prize for most disgusting, funniest dish, I am including it here. Be warned though, people won’t eat it, despite rumors that it’s actually quite tasty. Some jokes are just way to close to the bones. n