Blog Entry: Halloween, disillusionment, and good recipes
Happy Halloween, everybody! For the first time in years, it actually feels like a real Halloween to me, because we're finally living in a neighborhood with lots of kids who trick or treat. (Two of them already arrived, fully costumed, last night, so we're expecting even more tonight, on the day itself.)
It's been over ten years now since I experienced a real Halloween, since I moved to Vienna when I was 22 - no trick or treat'ers there - then to a neighborhood in Pittsburgh that was full of Russian immigrants who hadn't adopted that particular piece of American culture. England has, by and large, adopted it, but my neighborhood in Leeds didn't have any kids of the right age, so for year we bought bags of Halloween candy in a hopeful way, then ended up donating them all to Patrick's office unopened.
In honor of a real Halloween, we even bought a real pumpkin, which my brother Dave and I carved last night. It was the first pumpkin I've been involved in carving since I was in high school, which makes it about 15 pumpkin-free years...and yet, pulling out the pumpkin goop was EVERY bit as gross as I'd remembered! Of course, Dave and I had always helped our parents do the carving, but we weren't the ones who had done the real work...which led to some seriously uncomfortable revelations this year.
First: wow, the carving is MUCH harder than it looks! And second: we couldn't believe that the pumpkin goop had to be thrown out! Both of us had been convinced that the goop was the part that went into pumpkin pie. Neither of us even likes roasted pumpkin seeds, so we'd confidently assumed that the goop was going to be the big cooking bonus! As it turns out: nope. The goop is just yicky. It's sad to be disillusioned on a major holiday.
But so it goes. Today, Patrick's promised to bring me back a can of pumpkin purée from town so that we can still make Halloween-style vegan pumpkin spice cookies, using the recipe that Deva Fagan recommended.
What about you guys? What are your favorite Halloween foods? (And if the answer is chocolate...well, who can blame you? ;p );