Sad news funereal friends! I’m afraid it’s true what they say, that all ghoul things must come to an end. Though I’ve had much fun sharing my Halloween menu and its recipes for clown braaaaains!, hobgoblin hamburgers and pumpkin parts, it’s time to put this four-part series to eternal rest. In this final installment I’ll share the remaining two recipes.

Dessert and drink can be a dangerous business. Typically laden with sugars and lacking in nutrition, these foods are too-quickly consumed at a monster’s party where everyone’s a-goblin. Favorite desserts like booberry pie and ice scream sundaes may delight the spooks, but they’re hardly healthful. And don’t even get me started on junk drinks like ghoul-aid and lemon slime soda; your thirst may be quenched but you’re not doing your body—dismembered or not—any favors.

This year trick your guests by serving healthier treats. Free of processed fats and sugars, the delicious recipes below are so super-natural, even mummy and deadie would approve.

EVIL STEPMOTHER’S POISON APPLES (Crunchy baked apples)
Adapted from The Great American Detox Diet by Alex Jamison

4 medium tart apples
2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup dried cranberries
4 dried Medjool dates, pitted and quartered
½ cup pecans, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons real vanilla extract
1/3 cup raw honey (vegans can substitute ½ cup brown rice syrup)

Pre-heat oven to 325F.

Cut ½ inch off the top of the apples. Reserve tops. Using a paring knife or apple corer, remove cores and some flesh immediately surrounding the core. Rub cored apples with lemon juice to stop them from turning brown.

In a medium-size bowl, mix together the cranberries, dates, pecans, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and honey. Spoon mixture into apples and then replace the apple tops.

Bake for 30 minutes. Makes 4 servings.

WITCHES BREW (Iced tea just as you like it with spooky cubes)
Adapted from Perfect Brewed Iced Tea recipe

Sugar-free iced tea:
4 regular tea bags (orange pekoe, green tea or combination)*
1 flavored tea bag such as ginger, peach, apple or berry (optional)
2 cups cold water
Additional water as needed
Stevia to sweeten

Spider ice cubes:
Ice cube tray
Plastic spiders, washed with dish soap and rinsed thoroughly
Water

To make tea: Unwrap tea bags (if necessary) and carefully slide off any paper attached to the strings. Tie strings together and place tea bags in a heat-proof 2-quart pitcher. Set aside.

In stovetop saucepan, bring 2 cups cold water to a rapid boil. Remove from heat and immediately pour into pitcher over the tea bags. Allow tea to steep for 20 minutes or more.

Once steeped, remove tea bags from pitcher, squeezing out excess liquid. Discard tea bags. Fill pitcher with enough water to equal 2 quarts. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled before serving.

To serve, pour tea over spider cubes. Stir in stevia, as desired for sweetness.

*Variation: Instead of bothering with combinations of regular and fruit-flavored teas, try 5 tea bags of Yogi Tea Mexican Sweet Chili. The ochre-colored, slightly spicy tea with hints of exotic cardamom and ginger will strike just the right chord for your Halloween entertaining.

To make spider cubes: fill empty ice cube trays with cold water. Drop one plastic spider into each cube mold. Freeze and enjoy.

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This concludes our four-part spooky supper series. Did you enjoy it? Do you have other recipes/ideas for Halloween entertaining? Leave them in comments!

There’s not much more to say except fangs for the memories and—as our friend the skeleton says—BONE APPETITE!

Post from: Hannihaus

Halloween Dinner Menu Part IV: Evil Stepmother’s Poison Apples & Witches Brew With Spider Cubes

Hello again ghoulfriends and enemies, broommates and bogeymen. When first we made acquaintance, I shared my murderous menu. Next, I told you about Clown Braaaaains!, a dish that is, like revenge, best served cold. Today we heat things up. No, I won’t be talking about what Satan’s packing in his pants (which is, of course, great balls of fire), but rather I’ll share two recipes—one for barbarous burgers, the other for freaky fries.

In contemplating a main course, I initially considered something more exotic. Sacrificial Lamb, or Fettuccini Afraid-O for example. But I’m a busy ghoul, and you probably are too, so for simplicity’s sake, I advocate an easy homemade offering. Sure, you could just dine out at a casketeria, but that can be costly … especially if you are a vampire, and dinner’s a stake sandwich.

HOBGOBLIN HAMBURGERS ATOP GRAVEYARD GREENS

1½ pounds ground beef
4 slices cheddar or Colby jack cheese, cut out in pumpkin shapes
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cups freshly washed baby spinach (cooked frozen spinach is OK too)
Pumpkin shaped cookie cutter

Prepare your grill or skillet for medium-high heat.

Lightly shape ground beef into 4 patties. Season both sides of each patty with salt and pepper.

Place burgers on a lightly oiled grill or nonstick skillet, and cook on one side until juices begin to seep to the surface. Flip over and grill on the other side until juice flows through. During the last minute or so of cooking, top each patty with a slice of pumpkin-shaped cheese, so that it can melt slightly before serving.

Serve atop bed of spinach greens, lettuce, or mixed greens. Enjoy Pumpkin Parts (sweet potato fries) alongside. Makes 4 servings.

PUMPKIN PARTS (Sweet potato fries)

3 smallish-medium sweet potatoes (about 2 ½ pounds)
1-2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste (maybe 1 teaspoon each)

Preheat oven to 450F.

Scrub and peel sweet potatoes, and then cut into long, thin strips (about ¼ inch thick and 2 inches long).

Place sweet potatoes in a bowl and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil; toss gently to coat. Add salt and pepper and toss again.

Arrange sweet potato fries in a single layer on large baking sheets and cook for 10-12 minutes each side, flipping halfway through baking. Makes 4 servings.

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Who is enjoying this series? If you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand. And also, come back for the next post wherein we bring this meal to its ultimate, but not untimely, dead end. Up next: Evil Step Mother’s Poison Apples and Witches Brew With Spider Cubes. Spooky!

Post from: Hannihaus

Halloween Dinner Menu Part III: Hobgoblin Hamburgers & Pumpkin Parts

Welcome guests, both living and undead, to the second installment of a four-part Halloween dinner series. Last time I shared with you the menu for our macabre meal. Today I’m frightfully delighted to provide the first recipe—one for a spine-chilling starter.

Originally I thought to start the feast with a simple soup. I selected a recipe from a Transylvanian tome, but found it quite literally too difficult to digest, what with all the clotting.

Instead we take inspiration from the living dead and enjoy a colorful carrot salad—teaming with good-for-ghouls root vegetables, raisins, and crucifers—that looks an awful lot like braaaaains! Clown braaaaains! Oh and by the way, it’s a common misconception that zombies eat this salad with their fingers. Fingers are eaten separately.

CLOWN BRAAAAAINS! (A spooky carrot slaw minus the mayo)

3 cups peeled, grated carrots (about 3-4 medium carrots)
1 cup thinly sliced red cabbage
1 large Granny Smith apple, cored and grated
1/2 cup raisins (organic of course)
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or grapeseed oil

Combine all ingredients in a medium sized bowl. Toss lightly. Chill before serving. Makes 4-5 heaping 1 cup servings.

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Enjoying the series? Dying for more? Check back for our marvelously morbid main course: hobgoblin hamburgers served atop graveyard greens with putrid pumpkin parts on the side. Why hamburgers, you ask? Well they say that meat is murder. We think that’s wonderful.

Post from: Hannihaus

Halloween Dinner Menu Part II: Clown Braaaaains!

Hello ghouls and boys. Pull up a corpse—er chair and settle in. I’m going to tell you a scary story. Of course if you are a mummy, please do not make yourself comfortable, as relaxation may cause you to unwind. For everyone else, let’s sit a spell … or two … or three.

Long ago, one Hallows Eve my friends M & M Misadventure invited me to dine at their annual spooky supper. On the menu: moldy old ladies fingers (cut fresh daily) and dog food dip, yummy mummy calzones, and coffin cake for dessert. After a dinner like that, it’s lucky I made it out alive. The food was, quite simply, to die for.

Now that I’ve relocated to the spooky ooky ooky state of Texas, it’s impossible for me to dine at the Misadventures’ embalming table. But like the ancient Egyptian’s harvesting of organs and intestines of their hallowed dead, I too like to preserve … tradition, that is. In this, the first of a four part series, I will share with you my (printable) menu for a simple Halloween dinner. And oh yes, don’t be frightened, but—free of refined grains and processed sugars—my specter’s spread is also quite healthy. Mwa ha ha ha ha!

SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO JOIN ME AT MY VICTIM’S TABLE, (AND I SINCERELY HOPE YOU DO), HERE’S WHAT I’LL BE SERVING ON HALLOWEEN:

Do you desire a copy of this monstrous menu for your very own? Crafty corpse brides and headless huntsmen playing along at home, this menu is available for print! — CLICK HERE FOR .PDF — It’ll be a scream!

FYI fonts used (and available for free download) include: Bloody, Bones and Ill October.

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Next in the Halloween Dinner Menu series? Join me as I dive right in … into the cranium of some poor clown, that is. Clown Braaaaains!, a shuddersome carrot salad—if you’re my guest, well, it’s what’s for dinner. And trust me, there is nothing funny about that.

Post from: Hannihaus

So Good, It’s Scary: Halloween Dinner Menu Part I

Me I thought the pops rocked. Mostly because—as a keen observer of the human anatomy—I couldn’t help but notice they resembled something we like very much at the haus.

Those rigid pops—positioned erectly in all their cold, hard, and shiny glory—looked just like ….

Well you know what’s coming dear hannihaus readers.

Yes, I was going to say they looked just like Nicole Kidman’s botoxed forehead.
…

Oh and also penis.

The pops looked an awful lot like penis, which is not weird considering that where you find nuts, you often find knob.

But I digress.

Post from: Hannihaus

That’s What She Said–A Hannihaus Snippet

After all, it’s hump day.

*bow chicka wow wow*

So Erin Cooks—that saucy bakerella—wants you to get some. And she knows just how to give it to you.

To get some sweet sweet love, enter to win Erin’s copy of the Warren Brown CakeLove cookbook. The recipes are smokin hot. Look at this Mojito Pound Cake EC made Monday. Tell me that’s not total food porn.

To win the torrid tome, just go to Erin’s blog and make a comment.  Do it here.

At the contest’s close a random number generator will pick the winner. And then it will pick the winner’s nose … and then it will pick the winner’s shoes … and socks … and wedgie … and whatever.

Well it might just pick the winner, but still that’s pretty cool.

So yeah, go visit Erin Cooks. Leave her a comment.

I will love you long time.

Post from: Hannihaus

Wanna Make Sweet Sweet Love? Erin Cooks Wants You To.

It’s springtime in the Lone Star state and that means it’s BBQ season. Like most Texans, the people I work with really love meat, so we had lots of it at our picnic.

Look here’s a picture of my friend Shex enjoying a sausage.

Shex is wearing a funny Mister Rodgers sweater, so when I saw this picture all I could think was: It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a beauty would, would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you eat my sausage?

I can see Shex singing this song, mostly because he is single and looking for someone to share his sausage with.

My friend Carolyn also enjoyed le pork.

She looks really happy. I think it’s because the sausage Carolyn’s holding is really fat. Some people say size matters. Who knows?

Me, I don’t like meat so much so I enjoyed another kind of traditional picnic fare called egg rolls.

I know. I was like WTF too.

So after we ate, it was time for games. I thought my boss would like it if I participated in one, so I did. I did this thing where you hop for 50 yards to the finish. It was pretty fun until the announcer started yelling at me to lift my sac. Although the 3 dudes I was competing against could claim otherwise, I don’t have that kind of equipment and I got real frustrated. But in the end everything made sense. See it turns out the “sac” the GameMaster was referring to was made of burlap. I did have one of those.

Look at me in this pic. I’m like WTF is this brown thing?

And then I’m like, cool dude it’s a bag. Let’s do a hip hop handshake to commemorate!

And then I was like, uh oh is this bag gonna make my butt look big?

And then the answer was, yes.

After the food and games I was pretty tired so I headed home. Carolyn, however, continued eat and enjoy her sausage. She sure was happy.

The end.

Post from: Hannihaus

My Company Picnic Was A Real Sausage Fest

Then the hostess baked a killer brie, served some sumptuous stuffed mushrooms and cooked the cutest baby quiche. Merriment—like our peppermint martinis–flowed freely. And it was good.

The party I attended was a BeanTown bash thrown by the lovely Erin Cooks and her charming boytoy (and our hannihaus admin), SORM. It was good to see Son of Marx again and it awesome to talk tortellini with the fabulous Miss E.

… Because that girl knows her tortellini … And she also knows her desserts.

After enjoying the decadent goodness of Erin Cooks’ famous peanut butter bon bons all weekend, I’m finding it hard to be without. I e-mailed my favorite bakerella this afternoon.

“Erin,” I wrote, “I need some chocolate-covered peanut butter balls right.effing.now.”

“So sorry,” she replied, “I tossed them this morning. Those little things are evil and probably 500 calories a piece!”

I was really bummed. She didn’t need to trash the sweets! Erin could’ve brought her balls to work. After all other people do it all the time.

Granted, those other people are called men.

But I digress.
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Not only can Erin cook, she also can click–a camera that is. Peep her pics stalkerazzi:

Post from: Hannihaus

Decking the Halls With Balls and Holly

“Rolls to bakery… rolls to bakery.”

Upon hearing the call for crusty bread, I began to snicker. And then guffaw. Eventually I started snorting… very loudly. So loudly in fact, that a small child, upon hearing the supersonic noises emitted from my left nostril, exclaimed “Mommy! Mommy! That’s the sound a pig makes!”

Indeed.

And he didn’t even need to see me in front of a carton of Edy’s Double Fudge Brownie to know that. What a smart kid.

Mariah Carey in a bikini: I don’t think I’m ready for that jelly.

Anyway, because I love playing Nancy Drew, and because my brain is so fantastical, I immediately began creating scenarios to explain the roll sitch.

The obvious first response –the one I employ when *anything* goes missing, be it socks, shoes, belly button lint, etc – is that Mariah Carey ate them. Anyone who’s seen Mimi in a bikini that’s four sizes too small knows that this is a perfectly plausible explanation… but I digress.

A second possibility, (and in my mind the more logical one), is that fresh out of the oven, the Publix hot cross buns, overhearing a conversation betwixt frat boys, misunderstood when HornyJoe said “I’d like to squeeze those melons.”

Taking the melon thing quite literally, the bite-sized dinner breads quickly made haste to the produce department. Once there they got all snuggly-like with the honeydews and cataloupes, in hopes that they’d get a feel up.

This is not too crazy when you consider most buns like a little squeeze every once in a while.

*ba dum bum ching*

Anyway, and in a disappointing turn of events, after staking out the bakery (having found a cozy niche adjacent the lemon meringues and layer cakes), I located the person to whom the “rolls to bakery” page was made. A moon-faced mama in her mid-50’s, the employee whose nametag said Rose, well she had a hairnet and predilection for pastries.

So that solved it. “Rolls to the bakery” was actually “Rose to bakery.” Apparently I need a hearing aid. And some crazy pills. And maybe a ThighMaster Gold, because – call me crazy – bun squeezing actually sounds kind of sexy.

Ooh la la!

Post from: Hannihaus

T & A On The Grocery PA

Second off, and on a related note, I want to let everyone know, if you’d like to freak out your ob/gyn do the following:

Eat about 2.5lbs of carrots in a 24-hour time period.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to do this because you’re a Nutrition Nazi who knows that carrots have the awesome ability to clean your liver and rebalance your body after it’s experienced the trauma of – let’s say – explosive diarrhea made possible by hospital hospitality.

(Because nothing says “We care” like a colon-blowing cocktail of Crystal Lite + Barium, but I digress.)

But yes, even if you’re not like me, you may still want to make like Bugs Bunny and scarf some carrots, because if nothing else, it makes things pretty entertaining in the powder room, if you get my meaning.

(Know how if you put a tree in a wood chipper it’ll spit out perfect little nuggets of wood? Carrots work the same way. My Indian name is she-who-makes-big-carrots-turn-into-baby-carrots, but I digress – again!)

So yeah, the ob/gyn… if, after having eaten copious amounts of carrots, you should find that your doctor requires a rectal exam, don’t sweat it. The finger in the kiester is not that bad, and the resultant conversation is even better!

3lbs carrots (organic, of course): $3
Office visit to ob/gyn to figure out cause of mysterious malady: $15
Hearing your doctor, post finger-in-fanny, stop mid-sentence to ask “uh… what did you eat today?”: Priceless

Post from: Hannihaus

Salad Shooter