Halloween Menu

When you entertain for Halloween, you will want to create a Halloween menu that reflects the theme of the festival.

Much of the fun from the Halloween theme in your menu is in the names you give your dishes. You can use almost any recipe, but choose a ghoulish name to terrify your guests as to what they may be about to eat. Dracula's Favorite Bloody Burgers, Ghoulish Goulash, Witch's Brew, Hobgoblin's Delight, Black Cat Stew, Diabolical Chili, Witch's Fingers, Spooky Soup and Creepy Rolls are some mild suggestions to get your imagination started.

It is a good idea to produce a written Halloween theme menu that sets out the various dishes on offer, and it is sure to get the conversation flowing as your guests speculate on what they about to be served.

There are some traditional dishes with a Halloween theme that you can call on, such as Mexican Day of the Dead tacos. The traditional Irish Halloween dish is a fruit bread called brambrack, which was baked with coins, rings and pieces of rag included to use for telling fortunes.

The pumpkin features large in Halloween, because of the jack-o-lantern cut out ghoulish faces made with pumpkins. If you are entertaining at Halloween you will almost certainly have made a few jack-o-lanterns and have plenty of pumpkin flesh available. Popular Halloween pumpkin menu items are pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins and pumpkin pie, but there are many other options as well.

Seasonal apples have also been closely linked to Halloween, especially through such popular games as bobbing for apples in a basin and trying to eat an apple on a string without using your hands. These games could be made part of your menu, or you could just include apple dishes to reflect the traditional Halloween associations.

Children have a fascination for food associations that are perhaps less than attractive, but good fun in the spirit of Halloween. Spaghetti is often associated with worms, which brings some cemetery humor to your table. A risotto can similarly be presented as a maggot dish. Tomato soup can become Halloween Vampire's blood soup.

With some effort on your part, meringue can be shaped into small white bones. Cup cakes can be topped with spiders made using icing, sweets and licorice for the legs. Iced cookies with the letters RIP iced onto them inserted into a chocolate mousse dessert can be made to resemble a graveyard.

A cake can be iced with a spider web pattern, and decorated with a large hairy plastic spider. Brownies or other squares can be iced with white icing to make tombstones. Bread sticks with a sliver of almond at the end resemble witch's fingers. Halloween theme cookie cutters can be used in your baking. Let your imagination run riot.

Your table setting can also be used to frighten your guests. Halloween decorations such as skulls, bones, spiders and the like liberally spread among your serving dishes add to the scary atmosphere. With proper care for hygiene and the safety of small children, in some places you can buy strange inedible decorative things that are suitable to include in your dishes, such as artificial eyeballs to float in the soup.