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October 27, 2008

Ghoulish goodies

Today I spent the day preparing food for a Halloween party. The party is tomorrow afternoon at my client's workplace. Here's the menu:

Ghoulish Tortilla Chips - flour tortillas cut out in Halloween shapes, sprinkled with salt and chili powder and baked until crispy. In retrospect, I should have just bought tortilla chips and given them a name tag. These took forever to make. What was I thinking?
Monster Brains (guacamole) and Monster Guts (salsa)

Pumpkin Rollups - sun-dried tomato wraps, spread with garlic cream cheese, parsley leaf for pumpkin leaf, toothpick for stem

Scary Eyeballs - spice cake centers, dipped in white chocolate, with M&M pupils. There are lots of recipes for these on the internet, many of them use peanut butter centers, but one of the guests at the party is allergic to nuts, so I used a mixture of spice cake and frosting (inspired by Recipe Girl.)

Witches Fingers - butter cookies. Inspired by these ghastly cookies from cuisinetc.

Mini Pumpkin Cheesecakes - crustless cheesecakes

Thanks to the folks on the Cooking Light Great Food board for your inspiration and advice!

Added 10/30/08: Here's a link to a PDF file that contains recipes for the chips, pumpkin rollups, scary eyeballs, witches fingers, and mini pumpkin cheesecakes.

Posted October 27, 2008 10:06 PM in Cook Dates | Comments (3)

October 7, 2008

My entry for the HP laptop giveway on CookingForEngineers.com

HP is giving away 15 laptops at 15 different web sites. Here's my entry for the CookingforEngineers.com site.

Posted October 7, 2008 6:59 PM in Miscellaneous | Comments (1)

October 5, 2008

Socca (farinata) gluten-free goodness

I've been promising my friend Marcy that I'd post this recipe. We made it together a few weeks ago when we had a cooking play date. Socca is a chickpea flour flatbread. The recipe that I used is from Mark Bittman. He originally published the Socca recipe in October 2005, which was before I was following him. But his blog revisited the recipe in May 2008, which is when it caught my attention. I'm always on the lookout for gluten-free breads to make for my gluten-free clients and friends, so I put this on my to try list. Also, my dad loves chickpeas, so I want to make this for him soon.

It's a very simple peasant bread. Great for an appetizer. And very easy to make. All you need is some chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour, water, olive oil, salt, black pepper, an onion, and some fresh rosemary. Oh and a cast iron skillet. I use Bob's Red Mill Garbanzo Bean Flour. You can also find chickpea flour at Indian markets or natural food stores. You can even make your own garbanzo bean flour by lightly roast dried garbanzo beans, then grinding them in a blender until mixture has the consistency of flour.

Chickpea flour tends to clump, so you need to make sure that you sift or whisk the flour to break up any clumps. Bittman says that the onions and rosemary are optional. Marcy and I made the socca with and without the onions. We preferred it with the onions. Bitman also recommends a healthy dose of black pepper, you want the sharpness of the black pepper when you bite into the bread. For the onion, we used a red onion because I just love red onions.

This recipe can be adapted in many ways. Bittman's May 2008 blog entry discusses making it with other types of flour, including buckwheat flour. I also found this recipe on Epicurious for a version with sage, olives, and onions. That sounds like a great combination.

Socca