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Your guest will line up to try this spooky bean dip full of tricks and treats (see recipe inside). (Hartford Courant/Bettina Hansen) |
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Halloween is thought to be a children's holiday, an invitation for pint-size marauders to dress up in fantasy costumes and scurry about the neighborhood collecting tricks and treats.
But the delights of the holiday are not confined to the junior set. At the West Hartford home of Susan Chandler — state historical architect, chapter leader of Slow Food Connecticut and hostess par excellence — Halloween is a pretext for an annual adventure into what Chandler calls "scary culinary."
Each year, Chandler hosts a Halloween dinner party complete with ghoulish table settings and frightening foods. The idea is to chill and thrill, but without causing guests to lose their appetites.
"You don't want to make something so unappetizing that nobody wants to eat it," says Chandler. She suggests "something that sort of gives the impression without being overly graphic."
In past years, the Halloween colors of orange and black have inspired meals using ingredients such as sweet potatoes, squid and squid ink, black beans and the black seaweed called hijiki. Bloody-red dishes are another possibility, with beet risotto for an entrée and a raspberry coulis as part of a dessert. Sci-fi horror is good for laughs, the kind evoked by a plateful of baby squid. "We've all seen those horror movies with people that would be grabbed by tentacles," Chandler says.
Dessert possibilities include sheet cakes decorated as tombstones, round cakes iced in patterns to resemble spider webs or, this year's offering, a blood-orange mousse garnished with gummy worms and a drizzle of "bloody" syrup.
Drinks are another opportunity for serving the suggestive. Chandler recommends blood red wine, stout, which is "dark and sludgy," or a pitcher of sangria. "You can have things floating in it — grapes as eyeballs — that take on a different meaning at this time of year," she says.
Whatever the menu, plate presentation is key. White mashed potatoes can be piped into ghostly mounds. Forceps can be set out to use as serving pieces for, say, a plateful of eyeball eggs. Spun sugar can form webs and cages.
Over the years, Chandler has amassed a battery of Halloween cookery items: cookie cutters in the shapes of bats, 'fraidy cats, pumpkins and witches hats; stencils to create shadowy ghosts, crows and witches sailing past a full moon; drink stirrers topped with bloodshot eyeballs; bone-shaped pedestals for platters; and a cauldron for serving soups or stews.
"Halloween has become such a great holiday in the retail world," Chandler says. She checks the Grandin Road catalog each season and makes the rounds at Pottery Barn, Michael's craft stores and Target. "I've been looking for a skull serving bowl. ... You can put anything in there and it works."
Chandler recently whipped together a scary feast including "graveyard" dip of black bean hummus, deviled eyeball eggs, a "cauldron of roasted flesh and bone" (wine-braised beef short ribs with rosemary and porcini) and the blood-orange mousse garnished with gummy worms.
Scary?
Absolutely.
Delicious?
An adult trick or treat.
Chandler found this recipe for black bean hummus in Sarah Leah Chase's 1990 cookbook "Cold-Weather Cooking." Garnish it with hands or tombstones and serve with orange sweet potato chips.
Graveyard Dip
Servings: 4 cups
Ingredients:
8 ounces black beans, dried or canned
But the delights of the holiday are not confined to the junior set. At the West Hartford home of Susan Chandler — state historical architect, chapter leader of Slow Food Connecticut and hostess par excellence — Halloween is a pretext for an annual adventure into what Chandler calls "scary culinary."
Each year, Chandler hosts a Halloween dinner party complete with ghoulish table settings and frightening foods. The idea is to chill and thrill, but without causing guests to lose their appetites.
"You don't want to make something so unappetizing that nobody wants to eat it," says Chandler. She suggests "something that sort of gives the impression without being overly graphic."
In past years, the Halloween colors of orange and black have inspired meals using ingredients such as sweet potatoes, squid and squid ink, black beans and the black seaweed called hijiki. Bloody-red dishes are another possibility, with beet risotto for an entrée and a raspberry coulis as part of a dessert. Sci-fi horror is good for laughs, the kind evoked by a plateful of baby squid. "We've all seen those horror movies with people that would be grabbed by tentacles," Chandler says.
Dessert possibilities include sheet cakes decorated as tombstones, round cakes iced in patterns to resemble spider webs or, this year's offering, a blood-orange mousse garnished with gummy worms and a drizzle of "bloody" syrup.
Drinks are another opportunity for serving the suggestive. Chandler recommends blood red wine, stout, which is "dark and sludgy," or a pitcher of sangria. "You can have things floating in it — grapes as eyeballs — that take on a different meaning at this time of year," she says.
Whatever the menu, plate presentation is key. White mashed potatoes can be piped into ghostly mounds. Forceps can be set out to use as serving pieces for, say, a plateful of eyeball eggs. Spun sugar can form webs and cages.
Over the years, Chandler has amassed a battery of Halloween cookery items: cookie cutters in the shapes of bats, 'fraidy cats, pumpkins and witches hats; stencils to create shadowy ghosts, crows and witches sailing past a full moon; drink stirrers topped with bloodshot eyeballs; bone-shaped pedestals for platters; and a cauldron for serving soups or stews.
"Halloween has become such a great holiday in the retail world," Chandler says. She checks the Grandin Road catalog each season and makes the rounds at Pottery Barn, Michael's craft stores and Target. "I've been looking for a skull serving bowl. ... You can put anything in there and it works."
Chandler recently whipped together a scary feast including "graveyard" dip of black bean hummus, deviled eyeball eggs, a "cauldron of roasted flesh and bone" (wine-braised beef short ribs with rosemary and porcini) and the blood-orange mousse garnished with gummy worms.
Scary?
Absolutely.
Delicious?
An adult trick or treat.
Chandler found this recipe for black bean hummus in Sarah Leah Chase's 1990 cookbook "Cold-Weather Cooking." Garnish it with hands or tombstones and serve with orange sweet potato chips.
Graveyard Dip
Servings: 4 cups
Ingredients:
8 ounces black beans, dried or canned
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