Autumn And Kids

joanne September 5th, 2009

These came from Frugal Village and they sound great! If you try any of them, let us know how they turned out.

Halloween Brain Surgery Salad

2 small or 1 large package of lime gelatin
1 16-oz. can fruit cocktail
2 surgical or rubber gloves

Prepare the gelatin according to the package instructions. Transfer to a dome-shaped mold. (A mixing bowl will do.) Drain the fruit cocktail and add it to the gelatin when it’s half set. When the salad mold is ready, unmold it onto a platter and drape the surgical gloves on each side. Makes 10 servings.

Edible Eyeball Treats

3.4-ounce box vanilla pudding mix
Jelly beans LifeSavers Gummies
Plastic eggs
2 empty egg cartons

Prepare the pudding according to the package directions. For each eye, fit a jelly bean into the center of a LifeSavers Gummies candy and place it in a plastic egg half. Fill the egg cup with the pudding, then place the egg halves in an egg carton in the freezer until they’re firm (about 3 hours). Remove the egg halves from the freezer and let them sit at room temperature for about 3 to 5 minutes. With the back of a fork, gently press down on the edge of the pudding, rolling the frozen ball out of the egg cup. If you’re not serving them right away, place the eyes in a freezer-safe dish in the freezer until you’re ready.

Green Ghoul Punch

½ gallon limeade
1 liter ginger ale
½ gallon lime sherbert

Mix together juice and ginger ale. Scoop sherbert and add to punch. Add marshmallows and maraschino cherries to float in punch.

Blood and Guts with Eyeballs

1 package green spinach pasta
1 jar spaghetti sauce
Stuffed Spanish olives

Boil pasta according to package instructions. Heat spaghetti spaghetti sauce. Cut olives in half to make “eyeballs” and place on top of the “blood and guts.”

Kitty Litter Cake

1 spice or chocolate cake mix
1 white cake mix
2 large pkg vanilla instant pudding mix, prepared
1 large pkg vanilla sandwich cookies
green food coloring
12 small Tootsie Rolls
1 new kitty litter pan
1 new plastic kitty litter pan liner
1 new pooper scooper

Prepare cake mixes and bake according to directions (any size pans).
Prepare pudding mix and chill until ready to assemble. Crumble white sandwich cookies in small batches in food processor, scraping often. Set aside all but about 1/4 cup. To the 1/4 cup cookie crumbs, add a few drops green food coloring and mix until completely colored.

When cakes are cooled to room temperature, crumble into a large bowl. Toss with half the remaining white cookie crumbs and the chilled pudding. Important: mix in just enough of the pudding to moisten it. You don’t want it too soggy. Combine gently.

Line a new, clean kitty litter box. Put the cake/pudding/cookie mixture into the litter box. Put three unwrapped Tootsie rolls in a microwave safe dish and heat until soft and pliable. Shape ends so they are no longer blunt, curving slightly. Repeat with 3 more Tootsie rolls bury them in the mixture. Sprinkle the other half of cookie crumbs over top. Scatter the green cookie crumbs lightly on top of everything (this is supposed to look like the chlorophyll in kitty litter.)

Heat 3 Tootsie Rolls in the microwave until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake; sprinkle with cookie crumbs. Spread remaining Tootsie Rolls over the top; take one and heat until pliable, hang it over the side of the kitty litter box, sprinkling it lightly with cookie crumbs. Place the box on a newspaper and sprinkle a few of the cookie crumbs around.

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joanne August 31st, 2009

With Halloween right around the corner, here’s a short ghost story to entertain your trick or treaters.

A WIRELESS MESSAGE:

In the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of
Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New York, the name of which the writer’s memory has not retained. Mr. Holt had had “trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted a year before. Whether the trouble was anything more serious than “incompatibility of temper,” he is probably the only living person that knows: he is not addicted to the vice of confidences. Yet he has related the incident herein set down to at least one person without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He is now living in Europe.

One evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting, for a stroll in the country. It may be assumed – whatever the value of the assumption in connection with what is said to have occurred – that his mind was occupied with reflections on his domestic infelicities and the distressing changes that they had wrought in his life. Whatever may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he observed neither the lapse of time nor whither his feet were carrying him; he knew only that he had passed far beyond the town limits and was traversing a lonely region by a road that bore no resemblance to the one by which he had left the village. In brief, he was “lost.”

Realizing his mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region of
perils, nor does one long remain lost in it. He turned about and went back the way that he had come. Before he had gone far he observed that the landscape was growing more distinct – was brightening. Everything was suffused with a soft, red glow in which he saw his shadow projected in the road before him. “The moon is rising,” he said to himself.

Then he remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and if that tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road in front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That was surprising; he could not understand. Again he turned, and again, facing successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was before – always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”

Holt was astonished – “dumfounded” is the word that he used in telling it – yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent curiosity. To test the intensity of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine, he took out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the dial. They were plainly visible, and the hands indicated the hour of eleven o’clock and twenty-five minutes. At that moment the mysterious illumination suddenly flared to an intense, an almost blinding splendor, flushing the entire sky, extinguishing the stars and throwing the monstrous shadow of himself athwart the landscape. In that unearthly illumination he saw near him, but apparently in the air at a considerable elevation, the figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding to her breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”

The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which, however, the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by insensible degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the retina after the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the apparition, hardly noted at the time, but afterward recalled, was that it showed only the upper half of the woman’s figure: nothing was seen below the waist.The sudden darkness was comparative, not absolute, for gradually all objects of his environment became again visible.

In the dawn of the morning Holt found himself entering the village at a point opposite to that at which he had left it. He soon arrived at the house of his brother, who hardly knew him. He was wild-eyed, haggard, and gray as a rat. Almost incoherently, he related his night’s experience. “Go to bed, my poor fellow,” said his brother, “and – wait. We shall hear more of this.” An hour later came the predestined telegram. Holt’s dwelling in one of the suburbs of Chicago had been destroyed by fire. Her escape cut off by the flames, his wife had appeared at an upper window, her child in her arms. There she had stood, motionless, apparently dazed. Just as the firemen had arrived with a ladder, the floor had given way, and she was seen no more.

The moment of this culminating horror was eleven o’clock and twenty five minutes, standard time.

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