Halloween!

I love Halloween. Well, I guess I love the Holidays as a general rule of thumb when I really think about it because it gives me a break from the day to day. I throw the chores aside to carve pumpkins or make snowmen. This year we got to do both in the same weekend which was different from the norm in my little corner of the world. We'll get to that in a bit but first I wanted to do the costume reveals.

For some reason where we live they don't have trick-or-treating on Halloween night. It irked me for years but I've since learned to just let it go. It has something to do with a belief that if trick-or-treat night is on a school night and limited from 6-8pm that somehow there will be less mischief. Your guess is as good as mine really. So the Thursday before Halloween is when the kids go trick-or-treating here.

Lily had decided this year that she wanted to repeat her costume from last year and be Ladybug Girl again. It's one of her favorite stories. Ladybug Girl is a small book series. Ladybug Girl is about a  little girl who finds herself afraid of normal things. But, when she puts on her ladybug girl costume her personality is transformed into this sort of super-girl mentality. Ladybug Girl can do anything! I read them to Lily constantly. So her costume was easy since we still had most of the parts from last year.

Jude was a garden gnome. I loved the idea because #1: he is the perfect height to be a garden gnome, #2 The costume called for things he could wear all winter; a hat (which I knitted), a coat, a pair of pants, a belt, and a pair of boots. How great is that?

I already shared the mask I made for Naiya this year. I promised to share the rest of her costume when it was done. I had wanted to make her a cape to go with it. She was totally on board. After a trip to get some fabric and a pattern we headed home. Now here's the kicker. I am many a thing, but I am not a seamstress. Yeah, I took home-ec back in middle school. I rocked at the cooking part and sucked at the sewing part. I remember making a pair of shorts. One leg was tighter than the other and one leg was shorter than the other. Hey, I'm not Marry Poppins over here ya know.

So I sat down, read over the pattern, pinned the material, and cut the pieces out. This is about when things started to go wrong. Nothing was what it should have been. Pieces weren't fitting together, the instructions may as well have been written in Greek, I was getting upset. It was a cape. The pattern consisted of 10 pieces. This should have been easy. The family was disappearing to other areas of the house to escape the black cloud that was hovering over me in the living room. I had to get the stupid cape done. I also had to get my Charcutepalooza project done. Why do I let so many things pile on at once?

I "may" have called my mom and complained that she never taught me to sew. Why?! Why hadn't she ever taught me to sew?! I "may" have threatened to never cook for her again. She "may" have been insanely kind and amazing and drove down the next day to bail my sorry butt out. Who knows what really happened. It's not important. What is important is that the cape and the charcuterie got done. And Naiya looked fabulous.

I mean really, really fabulous. The cape will be kept for future costumes. I can see a vampire or a witch in its future. Thanks mom, you're the best and I love you :)

Then something very unusual happened. No, not the snow. We'll get there. I went out to the garden to give a neighbor a cabbage and I looked at my strawberry plants. I had started them from seed this spring, and I wasn't expecting to get anything this year. Then about a month ago I noticed some berries forming. I really didn't think anything of it. However when I was giving my neighbor the cabbage we started to talk about the strawberry plants. I had gotten an heirloom variety that produced yellow strawberries, the ones on the plant looked more white then yellow. I bent over to pluck off one of the unripened berries to show him and low-and- behold it was ripe! So I got to harvest a handful of yellow strawberries at the end of fall.

The next day it snowed. It was beautiful and surreal with most of the leaves still on the trees. We went for a walk over to the park to enjoy it.

The kids waited impatiently for the snow to get deep enough to make some snowmen. We had decided to make our snowmen a little different...



Trick? or Treat?

You gotta love your jack-o-snowman.

The last thing I wanted to share was a little treat my mom used to make for me when I was a kid. I thought it was appropriate given that it is Halloween. And really, wouldn't it be a little starnge not to have a recipe mixed in with all of this?



Flour Tortilla Pumpkins

Ingredients:

• flour tortillas
• butter; softened
• powdered sugar

Directions:

1. Cut a face into a flour tortilla. Rub softened butter over both sides of the tortilla.
2. Place tortilla in a skillet that has been heated over medium heat. Cook tortilla until browned and a little puffy on both sides.
3. Remove from heat and serve with powdered sugar dusted on top.

Notes: You can also dust it with cinnamon sugar. Another Idea is to make a cheese quesadilla instead. Using two tortillas layer cheese on one, cut the face out of the other and cook until the cheese is melted. Just make sure that the cheese is clear of the facial features so it doesn't make a big mess.



The kids loved them as much as I remember loving them when I was their age. They even got the Lily stamp of approval. Since she's my pickiest eater that is really saying something.

This weekend was great and exactly the break I needed from the day to day routine. I think we all had a lot of fun.

Happy Halloween!