Get Silly With Your Halloween Spread, Your Kids Will Love You For It
There is possibly no holiday more ripe for playful food than Halloween. There’s the gross-out factor, of course: peeled grapes become lost, floating eyeballs; spaghetti and sauce are revealed to be— the horror! — intestines; and a well-placed ketchup spill suddenly seems suspect. But there’s also the silly and traditional factor: We eat donuts tied to a string in the northeast United States, bake rings and cloth, peas and sticks inside barmbrack in Ireland, and peel apples and use heads of kale to predict the future in Scotland.This year, we’re embracing the silly. There’s already plenty of horror to go around, so for our Halloween spread, we’re sticking to the lighter side of this spooky holiday. Bring on the undead in the form of mummified sausages with googly eyes and skeleton-shaped pizzas. We’ll take spiders, it’s true — but only if they’re the spider-shaped olives on our vodka sauce mini pizza.These foods are fun, and that’s the point. Our collection of Halloween recipes is meant to bring out the kid inside you (and get the kids in your life excited to help cook). Mummified sausages are a festive take on pigs in a blanket, with crescent rolls cut to suggest a cloth wrapping and googly eyes applied post-bake to create a very approachable mummy. While you could certainly make your own rough puff pastry, we’ve gone ultra-simple here and used the classic Pillsbury dough. (Is there any better feeling than popping open that can?). Our “spider” olives come together in just six slices of the knife, and our pizza skeleton, while a bit more of an artistic challenge, is infinitely riffable. Mortadella and mozzarella on the skull? Sausage and banana pepper legs? Hips made of pumpkin and chili oil? Sign us up!If you’re looking to get your kids involved in the preparations, little hands are perfect for unwinding crescent rolls, placing spiders on top of the stretched dough, applying googly eyes, and topping dough bones. And we promise— like really promise — your kids will want to eat these foods once they come out of the oven.This article features the recipes Mummified Sausages, Olive “Spider” Pizza with Vodka Sauce, and our Halloween Pizza Skeleton.