Christmas Candy Countdown

You have too much leftover Halloween candy, don't you. I don't even have kids, we didn't even have trick or treaters, and still we bought a bunch of candy...because Halloween. 

So, use up your extras in a super fun way that was a highlight every year when I was growing up. The Christmas Candy Countdown.

This one's made of fabric.

Instructions:

• Find some kids that you love; count them. 
• Gather the following supplies per counted kid:

• 25 pieces of candy for their countdown stash (You can select or they can choose. My mom says one year I chose all Tootsie Rolls so I could eat the best stuff right away. I don't remember this, but it sure sounds like something I would do.)
• A roll of plastic wrap, or wrapping paper, or if you're ambitious, your odd yards of Christmas fabric
• Ribbon, string, anything about 8 to 10 inches long that ties, some clothes pins, or some sturdy twist ties—any securing device :)
• Line up the pieces of candy and then measure that same length in plastic wrap or wrapping paper. (For fabric, you may need 7-inch-wide strips of whatever you've got, short ends sewn together, then long ends sewn into one long tube, to meet the length required. Payout for this more complicated method is that you get to reuse the countdown next year, but if you're like me, sewing is like running and you do it only when you don't see any other means of escaping your dilemma, so you know, do what you're up for.)
• Pinch your wrapping material between each piece of candy with your securing devices. Cut your ribbon or string into 8-inch pieces. (For fabric tubes, tie off one end of your tube and call it the bottom; drop first piece of candy down to that bottom then tie off above it, then drop candy on top of that, then tie, drop, tie, etc.)
• Hang countdown from something high (or coil up like a snake in a box with the first piece of candy hanging out, or do whatever you want, because you're creative like that).

There are so many combinations of these steps and materials to make this fun for the whole family! When you use clothes pins, you can write the countdown numbers on them in colorful marker. You can use colored plastic wrap. You can zigzag your filled tube to look like a single-line Christmas tree with a name-tag star on top.

Like this. Kinda.

Got ideas for other ways to variatize (made-up word) the craft? Leave a comment and we'll all benefit. There's no limit to the fun, so go have some!

The Pie Bar

Make your Pi day (March 14th) or Thanksgiving day an event to remember because you actually get to join in and enjoy it!

I love pies during the holidays, but a perfect flaky-crust-to-filling ratio is hard to achieve and sometimes I just don't want to take the time. This post showcases my favorite way to prepare and serve pies: the build-it-yourself Pie Bar.

The concept is easy: separate filling from crust and let people put as much or as little filling on their cooked cutout crusts as they want.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Place flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Stir together. Use pastry blender to cut the shortening into the flour until it forms rice-size pellets. Sprinkle in water one tablespoon at a time, mixing with large spoon or rubber scraper until flour is moistened and dough almost cleans the sides of the bowl as you stir.

Gather dough into one ball. Flatten on a lightly floured surface and roll out to about the thickness of the ridge of a standard canning lid. The nice thing about the pie bar is you don't have to roll out a perfectly round dough. Just roll it out to whatever shape it becomes.

Cut out pie shapes large enough for one reasonable serving of pie and place dough shapes on ungreased cookie sheet (though I almost always clothe naked baking sheets with parchment paper and recommend it if you've got some). Take a fork and generously stab the dough shapes to prevent dough bubbles. With this leaf shape, you could make your fork stabs look kind of like leaf veins.

Always be adventurous in your creativity. You can brush some of the dough shapes with cream or egg white and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar for crusts to be eaten without filling. Or grate some gruyère and press it into some dough shapes for serving your apple pie filling.

Bake shapes 10 to 15 minutes or until a golden finish just begins to appear. Remove from oven and let cool in pan 3 to 5 minutes.

Remove from pan and serve or carefully set aside on display plates for when it's time for dessert.

For fillings . . . there are countless recipes out there. Mostly I choose the easier routes for the Pie Bar because the concept was engineered for laziness. Make your cream pies from box puddings. A couple scoops of a variety of puddings on as much crust as I want is kind of how I imagine heaven will be. Somehow correlated. . . .

I still cook up my favorite fillings, just without the crust where possible. The only pie I still make in a pan with the crust beneath the filling is the pumpkin pie, because, well, pumpkin pie.

I slice up fresh apples, mix them with sugar, flour, and pie spices and dump them in a ceramic pie dish and bake the filling without crust at 425, stirring occasionally, until the apples are soft. I even once dared mixed in one can of pie filling to make my apples go farther. It felt like I was sinning. The filling was still delicious.

I line the parchment-shod bottom of a pie tin with pecans and dump in corn syrup, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla; and toss them both in 350 degree oven until set. Then I take it out, mix up the gooey filling, and put it in a separate serving bowl.

Open up cans and boxes and make the holiday easy on yourself for once. No one complained at my house to have this freedom of pie choice. But if you think about the past, no one ever really gave thanks for the two hours each of those twelve homemade pies represented either. So if you love making pie for the sake of making pie, choose your favorite one and take as long as you want to make that pie your PERFECT pie. Then take a load off and serve up the rest Pie Bar style and I promise your holiday will still make everyone happy.

The best part about the Pie Bar is that you get to break all the traditional pie rules! You can have apple-coconut-creme-with-chocolate-shavings pie if you want. You only limit yourself to whatever you put on the table. Toast up coconut shavings; cut out even smaller dough shapes and serve them as "top crust" garnishing; dice up fresh pears and caramelize them with some butter and toss in roasted pecans, because why not?; of course make the Oat Crumble Topping because that's good on anything.

And so you see, by looking outside the pie pan, the height of creativity jumps over the moon.

Happy adventures in the kitchen to you, and happy holidays too!

Fun Halloween Mystery Dinner Party

The Menu Meddler and Dinner Dabbler teamed up to stir up trouble with this spooky menu just in time for Halloween!

Feeling mysteriously hungry? :)

Years ago, my brilliantly creative mom and I came up with a fun menu for an awesome Halloween mystery dinner party. It was a hit with my twenty-something friends! Whether you plan to entertain kids or adults, this meddlesome menu will add some bewitching charm to your event. I provide our "interpretation" of the menu items, but as always, we encourage you to experiment with your own favorite finger foods and mystery names for them!

First thing we had to do was hide the kitchen. Tack down a wire and use clothespins to hang sheets from it. If you have Halloween sheets, all the better! Of course this provides little protection from the zealously curious youngsters that still peep through, but some sort of divider is vital to keeping the menu a mystery.

Warning: Be prepared to make a big mess!

My prep advice is to grab everything that can be set out and have it ready. Plan ahead to get the items that need to be cooked done in time for the dinner. Once your menu orders start coming, they'll pile up quick. Be sure to give yourself a "plating area"—room where you can set a plate down as you get it ready. It's super helpful to have food items organized so you can fill a plate quickly and get it back to the table of hungry little monsters.

If you are throwing a kid party, enlisting the help of some extra parents is a wise move.

Another tip: My mom is queen of collecting disposable to-go and single-serving dishes. These include little paper fry boats, plastic fry sauce cups, various-size to-go boxes, etc. These types of items come in extremely handy for dinners like this!

Rules of the Game

The guests receive their own menu and a marking device. Each guest writes their name on the menu (or you won't know who to return the order to). We placed each menu in a sheet protector and had the kids use erasable markers. When the menu is sent back to the kitchen, it can only have three items checked at a time. As soon as every menu has been to the kitchen once, guests can reorder as many times as they want, three items at a time!

Suggestion: Have people write numbers: three 1's for the first order, three 2's for the second, etc. to keep the orders in order!

It's really fun to watch guests react to the results of their selection. Pretty soon, after enough items come out to the table, people figure out the menu, but at least the first round of orders provides a good chuckle—or groan! Guests can reorder items they've already eaten, they just have to make it clear on the menu.

It gets really tricky, as you can imagine, guessing how much of each food item to have on hand so you don't run out. We had loads of leftovers, but hey—that means everyone who wanted to got to leave with a to-go container(s) of their favorite goodies! :)

Main Course

These are the items that require the most preparation, so be sure everything else is ready and time yourself to have these menu items hot and ready to serve when dinner begins.

Chopped Beetles in Mummy Shrouds (Taco meat in corn tortilla)

If you microwave the tortillas layered between moist paper towels, the tortillas will be less likely to split in half. Mix refried beans with the seasoned ground beef to make the filling go a bit farther.

Bloody Fried Fossils (Ketchup with dino-shape chicken nuggets)

These nuggets are the best! Maybe not necessarily for your health, but they're the best for fun dinners.

Moldy Mummy Toes (Lil' Smokies wrapped in crescent roll)

Cut strips of dough from each crescent triangle and wrap around each lil smokies dog. Bake according to crescent roll directions. Serve with ketchup.

I started wrapping two smokies in one crescent until my mom showed me how she envisioned the mummy toes. Both ways work, but I admit the individually wrapped smokies are cuter!

Bloody Brains (Spaghetti with meat sauces)

Just your typical red sauce on spaghetti! (Omit meat for vegetarian option.)

Sides

Sticks in Your Eye (Scoop of pretzel dip with stick pretzels stuck in it all around with an olive pressed in the center)

I love this side, but not too many kids ended up going for it. Serve in plastic sauce cup.

Frankenstein Teeth (Tater tots) (Don't forget these also require some of the prep time in your oven!)

Serve with ketchup.

Vampire Stake (Breadstick with garlic seasoning)

We used pre-baked breadsticks from the store, spread on some butter, sprinkled garlic salt, and heated them 3 minutes in the oven as directed. For kids we sliced the breadstick in half with a diagonal cut so the "stake" looked sharp. Serve whole for adults.

Mummy Skins & Hot Lava (Chips and salsa)

We used little fry boats to serve some of the items, chips and salsa included.

Sweet n' Salty

Mom just divided the rest of the menu into sweet and salty, but I would've made another category called Desserts, so it would have been divided: Main Courses, Sides, Sweet n' Salty Snacks, Desserts, Beverages. Or you can be mean and mix the items all up without headings and see how lucky (or unlucky) people guess! "Here are your three beverages for dinner!" :)

Pumpkin Poo (Cheetos)

Care Bear Poo (Rainbow chocolate chips)

Chances are there was a wedding in your life recently where, sadly, they served those pastel-color chocolate chips with white-sprinkle bases. This is the perfect recycle use for those plenteous leftovers!

Ghost Poo (Popcorn)

It just never gets old to hear people crack up about poo—and this time about eating it!

Night Crawlers (Jell-O worms; gummy worms)

Use stretched-out bendable-neck straws for the realistic earthwormy effect!

If you've never seen how to make Jell-O worms, here, visit this other site that already has all the instructions written out. Or take the easy route and buy gummy worms!

Werewolf Fingernails (Bugles chips)

Frog Legs (Baby pickles)

La Brea Tar Pits (Chocolate pudding with animal crackers)

Wish I'd gotten a quick pic of these, but the wild fun had already begun! Serve in plastic sauce cups. Scoop a spoonful of chocolate pudding into the cup and stick a couple animals "in the mud!"

Like this, except animal crackers IN the pudding.

Pirate Planks and Boo Juice (Graham crackers and milk)

Bloody Twisted Veins (Red licorice vines)

Devil's Inferno (Red hot candies—hot tamales, red hots, etc.)

Slimy Swamp Grass (Salad with dressing)

Dye the ranch dressing bright green if you want!

Skeleton Fingernails (String cheese and almonds)

We forgot to include these on the menu, so we had a lot of string cheese left over. :) One string cheese cut in half and the half cut into four makes eight "fingers" from one string cheese. Stuff almond slices into the end and serve in plastic sauce cup.

Ghosts in the Graveyard (Scoop of ice cream covered in Oreo crumbs and topped with decorative ghost) (Dessert)

Meringue Ghost Recipe. Hey, pretty much there are no new ideas . . . just new twists to the same old ideas, right? That's what this blog is all about. So if someone else already wrote it the old way, I send you there. No need to redo the work! Make sure your egg whites get really stiff so you don't end up with what look like snowmen on a warm day!

Frozen Tombstone (Ice cream sandwich cut in half) (Dessert)

Decorate the sandwich half with goofy writings in frosting.

Ground Grasshoppers (Mint chocolate chip ice cream) (Dessert)

Make sure you don't serve this scoop all rounded off and looking like actual ice cream. Scoop the ice cream and then stab it with a fork until it looks more like ground grasshoppers. It may prove cathartic after filling the twentieth menu order!

Beverages

Mad Scientist Brew (Soda with a chip of dry ice)

Serve in clear cup . . . or test tube vials if you have those kicking around like my mom does. (Truest queen of food containers, I avow.) We cut slits into the bottom of small plastic cups, turned those cups upside-down, and served the vial suspended upright in the cup holder. That proved to be VERY little beverage, so we started serving the soda in regular cups with the test tube as just described inside the cup.

As always, use caution with dry ice!

Haunted Spirit Tears (Sprite)

Ghost Blood (Water or milk)

Murky Moat Water (Chocolate milk)

Mom hot-glued spider rings to the bottom of the paper cups so the drinker would have a startling surprise after a few gulps!

Witch's Brew (Root beer)

Ghost in Witch's Brew (Root beer float)

Here's a peek into the kitchen sometime after the mystery dinner began:

And, if dinner wasn't enough for one night, stay tuned for a post about party activities you can involve the kids in while food is being prepared in the kitchen. No doubt, you'll be the hippest Halloween dinner party thrower on the block that people will brag about for years to come!