How to Make Your Food a Little Creepy This Halloween (the Lazy Way)
I like to cook. I love eating. I love to eat what I have prepared. However, I don’t like decorating my food. Don’t get me wrong, I love themes and am always in love with playful seasonal dishes, but my artistic skill is sorely lacking. I am also quite lazy and easily get frustrated with detailed work.
So while other food publications post slideshows and reviews of deliciously creepy Halloween treats, I have no choice but to watch with envy. I’ll never be the one to whip up Frankenstein’s green root dogs , deliciously decorated pumpkin muffins, or a dark and mysterious charcoal cocktail. I only have three creepy cooking tricks: proschitto, olives, and sliced almonds.
When in doubt, cover something with prosciutto.
It is impossible to look at prosciutto and not know that it is meat. It is pink with greasy streaks and unpleasantly sticky. Wrap it around a fake thighbone, drape it over your skull, or strategically place it over a creepy mask (as I did for the photo above) and you’ve got the start of a delicious haunted dish. (Just make sure you clear the mask and / or fake bones first.)
Prepare food for hands (included with nails)
Nails are incredibly worrying. Imagine finding it in food. Terrible . Sliced almonds are, for better or worse, very similar to nails. You should take advantage of this.
Carrots, bread sticks, and sausages instantly creep when you add an almond nail. All you have to do is find a finger-shaped dish, spread it with cream cheese and press on top of an almond nail. (If using carrots, cut a few thin slices near the center to form a joint for the appetizer to scream “phalanx!”
Make olive spiders
A lot of people use olives to make eyeballs, but mine never looks right because, again, I’m really bad at decorating. But I can slice up a few pitted olives and arrange them to look like a clumsy, incredible spider. I once made 24 olive spiders to sit on a batch of spiced eggs that I took with me to a Halloween party and people were very fascinated (although they may have been just fascinated by the presence of boiled eggs).
All you have to do is take the jar of pitted olives and cut it in half to make two spider bodies. Then cut another one into four rings and cut these rings in half to make the legs. Place the spider’s body in a sauce, or a cheese ball, or a few stuffed eggs, then place eight small legs around the body. So we got a charming spider. (Now you can eat olives! It’s a win in every way!)
If these three incredibly lazy cooking tips are too hard for you, you can always go back to the beets: chop them up on a cutting board and use the board as a bloody display of horror, serve pickled beets along with a cheese plate. or mix them with sauces and hummus. Beets will always look bloody without your input. (Thank you, beetroot.)