As a dedicated Slashfoodie, you've already noticed that for Valentine's Day, we at Slashfood wrote a lot about such expressions of romantic appreciation as were appropriate for general readership. We introduced you to chocolate from Askinosie, Dagoba and Green & Blacks. Hopefully you're not too chocolated-out after the weekend for just one more bite. Because if the chocolate is Escazu, you will want to make room.
Escazu is a town in Costa Rica and a chocolatier in Raleigh, North Carolina. According to the Escazu website, chocolatier Hallot Parson formed Escazu Artisan Chocolates after travels through Venezuela and Costa Rica, including visits to the cocoa farms. Thus was born -- perhaps more accurately bloomed -- the vision of artisinal chocolate executed with respect to chocolate's Latin American heritage.
As you've likely been reminded during the last month, mint is unavoidable during the holidays. Everyone thinks you want a candy cane (and to be fair, many people do, and God bless them ev'ryone). If people think you're a southern cook (even when you're not), they are anxious for you to try their handcrafted julep, which makes you anxious to avoid having your face freeze in the chic grimace with which Rosalind Russell greeted those honey-based daiquiris in Auntie Mame. Some will even corrupt the holiest of holies -- chocolate cake -- by whirling peppermint oil into the ganache.
Therefore, today's moral quandry: you love Absinthe (though you are somewhat disappointed that it is now legal) but you don't like mint. Can you, who have heretofore avoided everything minty except Girl Scout cookies and toothpaste, now embrace a breath mint that combines oil of anise with a pungent hit of wintergreen? If they're these absinthe mints, yes, you can.
We at Slashfood hope that you have a fun, safe and tasty Halloween! May your trick or treat bags overflow with chocolates and blow-pops and may your sugar hangovers be quickly cured (we recommend breakfasting on yogurt and homemade granola or slow cooked steel cut oatmeal to lessen the blow of candy overindulgence)
If you're anything like me come October, you buy a big bag of Halloween candy, oh, three weeks before the actual holiday with the idea of "getting ahead"--only to have the entire bag mysteriously disappear, leaving you to explain to your significant other that it must have fallen into the cracks in the pantry. Or you're good, good, good until the day itself arrives, and ten minutes before the city's official trick-or-treating time starts, you're tearing over to the grocery to pick through the leftover bags because you've "accidentally" gorged on your own.
Or, (worst case scenario) you are really, really good until your kids have come home with their stash and collapsed into sugar comas in bed. And then you raid theirs and take out all the good stuff, and tell them the next day you went through the pile for "safety reasons."
This year, in order to distract myself from the actual candy, I decided to put together a little Halloween candy and wine-pairing guide. This way I'll have something to sip while I hand out candy and wait for my kids to come home with full buckets (insert evil grin here).
The National Confectioners Association lives in a world of candy all year long. What do they do at the office to celebrate the day devoted to candy? I would expect much revelry and perhaps even the day off of work. There would be lots and lots of free candy for all employees - maybe even candy flying out of windows onto the streets!
According to the Candy Dish Blog (the official blog of the National Confectioners Association), they have a pot luck lunch. I'm a bit disappointed with this news. However, at least someone brought in a cake laden with candy. As you can see in the photo, there is lots of candy all around the cake. Thanks goodness!
Does your workplace have them beaten? What are you doing today?
Halloween is one of those holidays that just begs for cupcakes. Between class parties, office treat tables and seasonal bake sales, there's no better time to put on your cake decorating hat and think creatively. The Slashfood Flickr pool has an amazing assortment of talented artists who have directed their abilities towards the pursuit of the perfect spooky, scary, haunted cupcake.
I've searched through the pool and put together an gallery featuring the best of the Halloween cupcakes added to the pool so far this year (big thanks to all of you who've added your pictures). If you made some Halloween-themed cupcakes (or for that matter, any fun-holiday themed treats) make sure to add them to the pool, as I'd love to see them.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Happy Halloween! This bento with a thousand eyes from Los Dragonnes' Reiko's Bento Lab is the most excellently creepy boxed lunch I've seen yet. The bloodshot eyeballs are tuna and rice with olives, the grim greyish ones are tofu-turkey balls and the alien-looking orange eyes are smoked salmon.
If you want a slice of adorable with your Halloween, go no further than ZooBorns.com. We're not the only living creatures out there that go nuts with pumpkins! From the uber cute frog above, to apes, tentacley things, and big cats, there's a whole slew of pumpkin-centric pictures to gush over. It's got me scheming a plan to buy and empty out a ginormous pumpkin and lure the bengal inside with a trail of catnip. But methinks that would lead to unhappiness similar to this baby with a lot of sharp, talon-led panic.
At the very least, if the pumpkin is big enough, you can scoop out some flesh for cooking and still have fun with the animals.
When I was a kid, my parents let me and my brothers each keep seven pieces of Halloween candy (we could have one piece each day for a week), and my dad brought the rest to work. So that no child may ever suffer such a cruel fate again, here are some more innovative ways to deal with your post-Halloween candy surplus!
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
I'm a big fan of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, so I like this Jack the Pumpkin king bento from Bento Corner a lot. The Jack sandwich is made with something called "sliced cream cheese" (Bento Corner describes it as a mix between cream cheese and regular sliced cheese - maybe it's Japanese?), smoked salmon, tamagoyaki (Japanese omelete), with nori detailing. On the side are ham and cucumber rolls, and macaroni au gratin (yum!).
We're almost to the night that brings mountains of candy and cavities -- whether you've got youngin's in the mix or just a few bags of tasty treats for visiting trick-or-treaters. The question becomes: What do you do with it all?
Do you find a drawer you can lock and fill it with your bags of treats?
Do you hide it throughout the home so that no one can find your stash and steal it?
Do you put it out for everyone and share, without the slightest murmur of stinginess?
Or do you succumb to the pressure of tons of candy and devour it before you have a chance to store it?
If you're the latter, or anyone else looking for some way to use up your candy without going into a chocolate coma, check out Recipe Goldmine's candy bar recipe list. You might as well let the treats work double duty -- not only depleting your stash, but also flavoring your next baked good.
When I was in the fourth grade, my mother handed out travel-sized tubes of sparkly, bubble gum flavored toothpaste on Halloween instead of candy. That night, several kids turned her down flat and one particularly outspoken ghost picked up a tube, took a look at it and tossed it back in the bowl, shouting, "Hey! That's not candy!" After that, she returned to mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and snack-sized candy bars (in the days before "fun" size). We spent years using up that awful toothpaste.
During my adult years, I've never lived in a place where trick or treaters come to the door, so I've never had the fun of picking out candy and opening the door to decked out princesses and eye-patched pirates (sadly though, I've consumed more than my share of Halloween candy in those same years). This year, I'm hoping to live vicariously through the Halloween experiences of Slashfood readers.
What kind of candy are you handing out this year? Has the tightening economy impacted the contents of your Halloween bowl? Do you typically buy the same candy year after year, or do you like to mix it up?
In an effort to stop the recent horrific incidents involving kitten sandwiches, confectioner Cadbury Adams has issued the following instructive poster encouraging those who enjoy eating kittenwiches to think twice and have a nice, chewy Swedish Fish instead. I've never been a real big fan of the gummy treats, and, no, I've never had a kitten sandwich.
Nor have I had any of the other bizarre meals that Cadbury created for its "A Friend You Can Eat," adverstising campaign. The others include a shot of a dude with hamburger dressings sitting on top of his head and a teddy bear panini. The web site also has a cool photo tool where you can upload a shot of yourself to be featured as one of the ingredients in the three bizarre meals.
Even though I'm no fan of Swedish Fish, I'll take one over a kitten sandwich any day. Hopefully this campaign will help keep kitten sandwiches out of Halloween goodie bags on Friday. On a side note, blogger The DoughyGuy says his cat does not like Swedish Fish.
There are so many things you can make with a cookie cutter. Cakes, breads, finger sandwiches, and cookies are the obvious choices, but you can also trace them to make crafts and decorations, give them as gifts, and wear them as jewelry. Okay, you shouldn't wear them as jewelry. Still, here are the eight greatest Halloween cookie cutters we could find!
1. Spiders and spiderweb (above) 2. Rat formerly featured at Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma (discontinued, but available on eBay) 3. Caterpillar 4. Tombstone cutter, also see the hearse and coffin 5. Pink heart because hearts kept coming up in our search and we realized that love is scary 6. These cutters are designed specifically for spooky pancakes! 7. Classy "Cookie Press" cutters make a great gift 8. Witch - we don't know where to get this one, but it's unrivaled in witchy goodness
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
This very cool ghost bento comes from the nifty Zakka Life blog. The two happy onigiri ghosts sit atop a (pork or beef slice?) cliff as nori bats flap their wings across a lemon moon. The tiny bottle of skull-and-bones "soy poison" is my favorite touch.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
As a dedicated Slashfoodie, you've already noticed that for Valentine's Day, we at Slashfood wrote a lot about such expressions of romantic appreciation as were appropriate for general readership. We introduced you to chocolate from Askinosie, Dagoba and Green & Blacks. Hopefully you're not too chocolated-out after the weekend for just one more bite. Because if the chocolate is Escazu, you will want to make room.
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We're almost to the night that brings mountains of candy and cavities -- whether you've got youngin's in the mix or just a few bags of tasty treats for visiting trick-or-treaters. The question becomes: What do you do with it all?
Second Helping of Slashfood - June 19
Competitive-Eating Contest to Pit Humans Against Elephants
The Backyard Boom - The Hungry Bride
