h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Adding green food dye to everything usually does the trick, but does anyone ave any better ideas?

frozen grapes in punch resemble eye balls (works best if they are white grapes in red punch)

Cocktail sausages can resemble severed fingers with a piece of onion as a fingernail or a cashew nut claw. A dab of ketchup completes the image.

Semolina already looks like frogspawn so add a chocolate frog as an extra touch.

Cut sandwiches into Halloween shapes - witches, cats, bats, skulls etc. You may be able to buy sandwich/pastry cutters made for the purpose or adapt round ones with a bit of ingenuity. Do the same with biscuits.

F

Ghoul Scout Cookies: Use your favourite recipe for rolled cookies. Cut the dough in the shape of tombstones and bake. When cookies are done and cooled, use a thin chocolate icing to pipe 'RIP' on each.

'Rotten Eggs': Dye hard-boiled eggs using a bath of strong black tea and a bit of white vinegar.

You can also also dye hard-boiled eggs orange and decorate them as miniature jack-o-lanterns, or leave them plain and create interesting-looking little skulls.

Marzipan can be coloured and shaped into pumpkins and whatnot and used to decorate cakes and such.

Cooked cauliflower makes a nice 'brain'.

Take corn or flour tortillas (the Mexican kind, which are just grain and water baked into thin 'pancakes') and cut them into seasonal shapes. Use them as chips with salsa or favourite dip.

Oh, and tapioca pudding, which is plenty disgusting all by itself...

You have a morbid imagination...

The worst I can remember was "Witches' Brew", which was a cocktail of every fruit squash that the combined mothers could find in their cupboards, served in a punch bowl.

B

Speaking of morbid imaginations...

When I was little my mother would fix a special meal before we kids went out trick-or-treating. We'd often have 'rouladen', which were meat rolls made with flank steak (?) pounded thin, spread with a filling involving mustard, bacon and dill pickle, then rolled up and secured with either tooth picks or twine. She told us they were roast mouse and roast rat.

Or else we'd have stuffed green peppers (monkey brains) with a side of rice (maggots).

We'd drink non-alcoholic bloody Marys (blood, of course) sprinkled with a bit of salt and pepper (insect parts).

We were, of course, responsible for scaring up our own dessert.

My dad just rolled his eyes at all the nonsense, but Mom knew how to get into the spirit of things and (not coincidentally) get her children to eat something besides hamburgers and pizza. We grew up with fairly adventurous palates. I still draw the line at squid, though, which would also be an interesting thing to serve to your Halloween guests, and you wouldn't need to pretend it's anything other than what it is.

A non-alcoholic Bloody Mary is known as a Virgin Mary and sounds ideal for Hallowe'en.

If you can buy them you could do baby squid in batter which look like little fried spiders.

F

We always had GHOULash!