Food Friday: Magic Spirits!

My neighbor, Miss Morning Glory, and I hold down the neighborhood fort on Halloween these days. The children are mostly grown and away or in college, with the last remaining youngster a senior in high school. Both our husbands travel, and were rarely home for all the ghoulish pleasures fraught with the holiday when the children were of an age to go Trick-or-Treating.

When the children were younger our street was peopled  by a bunch of grumpsters and not  many other kids. No one really comes here to trick-or-treat, even now, except the three little ones next door and a pair of elementary school kids who live in the house on the corner.

Back then, when it mattered how much loot they could gather, I would leave a bowl filled with candies on the front porch chair,  hoping our few little twilight visitors would be well-mannered and  respect the code of Halloween, and not grab all the candy at once. Who knows? Perhaps the nightmarish sprites were legion and only took a discreet amount of candy each. The bowl was never emptied completely, so we have myriad theories…

I would walk my two to the cooler streets in our neighborhood, where people really knew how to throw a mean monster mash. We met up with their school chums and the parents we enjoyed the most. ( They were the other grown-ups who would get dressed up; the ones we could carve pumpkins with, and who could manufacture a feast of a dinner out of a quick drive through the long-gone Burger King. Those were the days!) The adults roamed the dark streets, trailing red wagons for the exhausted and sugar-strung-out munchkins’ inevitable melt-downs, sipping our cups of wine or other elixirs, walking through piles of wet leaves, chatting madly. At some houses our wine was even topped up by generous and perceptive stay-at-home parents.

Fortification was necessary, because the rest of the  neighborhood was seriously kid-centric and over-the-top. There was a mounting competition among the neighbors for decorating. (The realtor had an annual pumpkin carving contest. We all had our obligatory kid-carved pumpkins. Never a prize-winner among ours because we let them hack at the pumpkins all by themselves. We felt lucky to arrive home with all digits accounted for.) We would make white trash bag ghosts to hang from the lower branches of the oak tree out front. In the better quality streets some people had whole graveyards materialize in their front gardens. We did not have the scary chain saw guys standing at the back of carefully designed corn stalks constructions in any yards on our street. Nor did we have a haunted house with dry ice smoke swirling around the gargoyles especially staged and lighted for the night. No Severus Snape lurked behind the picket fence, waiting to rescue young Harry Potter from Death Eaters.

I always loved how the kids would make plans to optimize gathering the best loot. There was a rumor one year that the wealthy attorney was giving out full-sized Three Musketeer bars! No! He was giving out five-dollar bills! Emboldened, a pack of boys trooped all that way to his house, seeking the holy Halloween Grail, only to receive mini Hershey bars. Sadly, they trudged back to our roving pack of wriggling toddlers and pirouetting princesses.  The tipping point  was when they all got whiney and needed to go home. Thank heavens for those wagons. All that exquisite planning for Halloween and it slipped away faster than a Christmas morning.

But I digress. Miss Morning Glory and I have for the last five or six years sat in plastic Adirondack chairs at the end of her driveway, tossing candy to the few and the brave who wander onto our thrill-less street in search of Halloween bounty. We do have a big wooden salad bowl, filled to the brim with candy corn and other wholesome tooth rotters, and we make merry with some cheap white wine. Usually. This year we are giving in to the tempting displays of local cider we have found at the farmers’ market. And this year we will share our witches brew with the normally-absent husbands. I think dressing up might be in order. I wonder if the old Cleopatra, Queen of Denial, costume would still fit?

This is a fancy cocktail from Bon Appétit Magazine, too fancy for us (too many ingredients), but perhaps you might find it helps you through the mini-marathon that is Halloween:

Fall Classic
Ingredients
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 15 sprigs thyme
• 2 tablespoons apple brandy (such as Calvados or Laird’s)
• 2 tablespoons bourbon
• 2 tablespoons fresh apple cider
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 dash of Angostura bitters
• Dried or fresh apple slice (optional)
Preparation
• Bring sugar and 1/2 cup water to a boil in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove pan from heat; add thyme sprigs and let syrup cool completely (a clear thyme flavor should come through). Discard thyme sprigs. (Leftover thyme simple syrup will keep indefinitely in the refrigerator.)
• Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add 1 tablespoon thyme simple syrup, apple brandy, and next 4 ingredients. Shake cocktail vigorously 10-15 times and strain into a chilled Martini glass. Garnish with apple slice, if desired.

Read More https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/11/fall-classic#ixzz2AKqick5p

This is a little more to our tastes:

Rachel Ray’s Hot Spiked Cider
• 2 quarts apple cider
• 2 cloves
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 4 shots apple brandy
• Optional garnishes: Mugs rimmed with sugar, orange twists, freshly grated nutmeg, or whipped cream
Heat cider with cloves and cinnamon. Pour a shot of apple brandy into a mug and fill with cider.
Simple, spare and to the point.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/hot-spiked-cider-recipe/index.html

Here is another that will see you through to Thanksgiving: https://www.onceuponachef.com/2009/10/hot-buttered-apple-cider-with-rum.html

This sounded like fun, too. Not that you can pass out anything homemade these days. Maybe the adults among your trick-or-treaters will enjoy some homemade Tootsie Rolls!

https://food52.com/blog/4717_homemade_tootsie_rolls?utm_source=FOOD52+Subscribers+List&utm_campaign=fb03e086b9-digest10_21_1210_19_2012&utm_medium=email

“A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween.”
~Erma Bombeck

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