salsa with carrot fingers
Elizabeth Hait"Please don't tell me you're the kind of mom who makes her kids' Halloween costumes," a new friend once begged me. No, no, nothing to fear in that direction except for the year my preschool daughter announced that she wanted to be a horse. My husband and I did make that costume, and it turned out so well that for years afterward it was recycled as a donkey in our church's Christmas pageant. But that was a one-timer.

No, sewing crafts don't hold much interest for me, but gross Halloween food is different. I'm not talking about baking the pumpkin seeds, either. (They inevitably turn out terribly, with icky bits of orange string everywhere, and that's not the kind of gross you want.) What you need is a Halloween meal that in addition to being delicious -- or at least edible -- is also ghoulish-looking.

Before we start talking about food, here's a tip: Do not attempt to serve any kind of organized meal on Halloween night itself. It absolutely will not work. First of all, your kids will be too excited to sit down. And even if you manage to force them into chairs and set plates of food before them, the doorbell will ring. Oops! All the other kids are already trick-or-treating! We have to leave now, or the candy will run out before we get there!

So on Halloween night, the best thing to do is to shove a piece of cheese into each kid's hand and get out the door. It's not as if the children won't be collecting plenty of calories to sustain them on their rigorous trek from house to house. But a Halloween supper on October 30 will spread out the festivities a little.

Keep the menu simple, but try to make all of the food at the table black, orange, or (mildly) scary. Since there aren't many kid-friendly black foods, what you'll basically be doing is either coloring or renaming ordinary foods. Here are a few tips that have worked at my house over the years:

• Black gel food coloring is the busy mother's Halloween dream. It adds maximum effort for minimum work. (Trying to mix the little drops of regular food coloring to make black simply won't work. No matter what, you'll end up with a sad dark brown or gray.) You can buy the good black stuff at any craft store, or from the King Arthur Flour Baking Company website. Stir it into the most ordinary foods -- milk, scrambled eggs, peanut butter -- and make them look horrifying without changing the taste a bit. Add it to soup and produce the perfect witch's brew. Or cream it into sugar-cookie dough along with the butter, and cut out bat cookies that are actually bat-colored.

• Give the kids orange juice ("orange"....get it?), and "bug" some ice cubes for them to add to their cups. Half-fill an ice cube tray with orange juice and let it freeze completely; then top each half-cube with a gummy insect or a raisin. Fill the ice-cube tray with another "layer" of juice, and freeze completely before using.

• And how about stirring those drinks with glow-in-the-dark light sticks? You can even get glow-in-the-dark ice cubes at a party supply store if you're the obsessive type.

• For a vegetable, make severed fingers: baby carrots with a sliced almond as a fingernail. "Glue" the almond onto the carrot with a tiny dab of cream cheese. Then stand the "fingers" up in salsa, which can represent any kind of gross chopped body part you choose. And speaking of salsa, blue corn tortilla chips make nice bat wings.

• Continuing the blood theme: Vanilla yogurt looks lovely with "veins" of thawed frozen strawberries or raspberries. (The fruits themselves are blood clots, of course.) If your kids like cottage cheese, you can stir in some ketchup to make bloody brains.

• On Halloween, it's fun to let the kids dunk for apples right at the table, in their own individual bowls. They can't make a real mess -- it's just water they're spilling.

• Most importantly, create a pleasantly creepy atmosphere by using jack-o-lanterns for candlelight. Of course this means carving your pumpkins a day early, but they'll keep, and it will mean that you'll have one less thing to do when you're dealing with trick-or-treating prep. By the time the doorbell starts ringing on Halloween night, you'll have the jack-o-lanterns lit, the kids costumed, and the huge pile of candy ready for trick-or-treaters.

Or you could just put the candy outside your front door and go to bed.


• Learn how to make candy crafts with leftover Halloween candy.
• Visit Holidash for Halloween decorating ideas.
• Plan a spookalicious menu for a kids Halloween party.
• Have the ultimate gross-out table this Halloween.