Food for a Halloween Menu

Since you may want to entertain on Halloween, you are going to want to have a Halloween food menu that reflects this interesting holiday.

Some of the fun from the Halloween theme in your food menu will be in the names you give your dishes. You can use almost any recipe, but choose a ghoulish name to peak the interest of your guests as to what they may be about to consume. Dracula's Favorite Blood Burgers, Ghoulish Goulash, Witch's Brew, Hobgoblin's Delight, Black Cat Stew, Diabolical Chili, Witch's Fingers, Spooky Soup and Creepy Rolls are some great suggestions to get your imagination started. It is a good idea to produce a written Halloween theme menu that sets out the various dishes on offer, and it is sure to get the conversation flowing as your guests speculate on what they are about to be served.

There are some traditional dishes with a Halloween theme that you can call on, such as Mexican Day of the Dead tacos. The traditional Irish Halloween dish is type of fruit bread called Brambrack, which was baked with coins, rings and pieces of rag included, to use for telling fortunes.

The pumpkin plays a large role in Halloween, due to the allure of the jack-o-lantern which is a pumpkin cut out into a ghoulish face. If you are entertaining at Halloween you will almost certainly have made a few jack-o-lanterns and have plenty of pumpkin flesh available. Popular Halloween pumpkin menu items are pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins and pumpkin pie, but there are many other options as well.

Seasonal apples have also been closely linked to Halloween, especially through such popular games as bobbing for apples in a tub of water and trying to eat an apple on a string without using your hands. These games could be made part of your menu, or you could just include apple dishes to reflect the traditional Halloween associations.

Children have a fascination for food associations that are perhaps less than attractive, but good fun in the spirit of Halloween. Spaghetti is often associated with worms, which brings some cemetery humor to your table. A risotto can similarly be presented as a maggot dish. Tomato soup can become Halloween Vampire's blood soup. It may be unappetizing to some, but good fun to others.

With some effort on your part, meringue can be shaped into small white bones. Cup cakes can be topped with spiders made using icing, sweets and licorice for the legs. Iced cookies with the letters RIP iced onto them inserted into a chocolate mousse dessert can be made to resemble a graveyard. A cake can be iced with a spider web pattern, and decorated with a large hairy plastic spider. Brownies or other squares can be iced with white icing to make tombstones. Bread sticks with a sliver of almond at the end resemble witch's fingers. Halloween theme cookie cutters can be used in your baking. What you do is limited by your imagination. Many times children will have good ideas.

Even the setting of your table can be done in a Halloween theme. Decorations such as bones, spiders, skulls, candy corn and similar items can be spread along the table and around your serving dishes. In the food itself don't be afraid to add artificial trinkets, which are uneatable, like plastic eyeballs floating in your soup. Just be mindful of the safety of adults and children. A Halloween menu is very fun to design and implement.

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