Creepy Crapo Family Halloween Dinner

The last few years, I've always hosted a Halloween Dinner. The first year was specifically for Lynette's 18th birthday where we made the creepy meal and then took her to Thriller, by Odyssey Dance Theatre, and it became a tradition. The food is supposed to be creepy and we eat in the near dark by candle light. The two things that are staples are the troll toe bread sticks and dry ice brew beverage.

This year it was HIGHLY recommended you dress up, but not everyone did. My older brother James was great as Richie Tenenbaum from the movie The Royal Tenenbaums. I was Sleeping Beauty (my crown got damaged in storage and is bent funny) and RJ was Gus Gus the fat mouse from Cinderella. My Mom came up from St. George for the weekend and at the last minute found a robe with a rope for a belt and called herself Friar Tuck, keeping with the Disney theme I guess. Herschel said he would totally dress up, and I should make him a Kermit the Frog costume, where his face in the hood is coming out of the frog's mouth. It was enough for me to sew RJ's white trash costume and I didn't get around to a 6' 3" frog jump suit so he ended up not dressing up at all, but you can see his head poking out from behind the picture of James and I.

In the end, it was a lot of fun and I wish my sisters had been around for it.

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Creepy Crapo Dinner
October 19, 2008

Appetizer:
Caterpillars wrapped in bloody bandages and marinated in dragon’s blood
lil smokey's wrapped in bacon recipe

Beverage:
Chilled werewolf saliva with a hint of beetle powder

Real apple cider (opaque and brown in the plastic jug) mixed with ginger ale, and dry ice for brew effect

Entrée:
Succulent mammoth flat-worms in a vampire puss sauce dotted with bat scabs beside a bed of aged compost topped with witch’s finger nails and ghoul claws in addition to classic troll toes.

Fettuccine pasta that Rhett made from scratch with bacon and sun-dried tomatoes in the sauce, bed of salad, and our favorite...the troll toe bread sticks. Add green food coloring when you make the dough. Add an almond for a toe nail and grated Parmesan for hair...too gross to eat? They are delicious and like I told Herschel, get over it. This one I used as an example is kind of too short and too fat, the good ones are wider in the middle to look like a knuckle, and the almond is closer to the top. I don't know why I chose a crappy toe as the example, sorry.

Dessert:
Bat droppings cake topped with mummy ooze

Poppy seed cake with cream cheese frosting. My intent was to reserve some frosting at the end and add red food coloring and thin it down to more of a glaze. I wanted it to drip down the sides of the cake like blood or something, but it wasn't thin enough, so I had a white cake with a ring of red frosting. Rhett and I were staring at it and he suggested I crumble Oreos along the base for dirt and say it's a guy with his head in the ground and they cut his head off, so that's why the blood doesn't drip, because his head is upside down in the dirt. Despite this detailed description, I ended up just throwing some gummy worms on there to call it scary enough...but man, what a disappointing dessert for the big Halloween dinner. I should have added the red food coloring to corn syrup and just plopped that on, that would have definitely dripped.

Anyway, you still have a while to plan/host a fun Halloween Dinner! I'm sure you can find more and probably better creepy food ideas than mine, my friend Kassie recommended bread bowls that were spiders...maybe next year.