October 31, 2012 Halloween – A Strange Day of Food

October 31, 2012  Halloween – A Strange Day of Food

I awoke with no plan for food other than to have some yogurt and fruit for breakfast.  Last Sunday I made a fruit salad with ½ papaya, a pineapple and the juice of three limes purchased at Pro’s Ranch Market a week earlier and ½ of a Crenshaw melon grown in our garden.  So I filled a bowl with fruit salad and granola and a large scoop of Lala Mango yogurt (Pro’s $2.99 for 32 oz.) for breakfast.

I became hungry again around 1:00 p.m. and called Mike, but he was going to Taj Mahal and I had gone there for lunch with him recently, so I decided to make what I am in the mood for these days, a bowl of noodle soup.   So I heated a pot of water and threw into it some dehydrated dashi, two chopped up pieces of cooked ham, a handful of sugar snap peas, 2 Tbsp. of diced onion, two kinds of noodles (a round wrapped Chinese wheat flour one and a Vietnamese rice stick one) three fish cake balls, some chopped fresh garlic greens and basil from the garden, three sliced water chestnuts a sliced stalk of celery and a green onion from the garden, two mushrooms sliced thinly, a dash of mushroom soy sauce, a dash of rice cooking wine and a dash of sesame oil and about 2 Tbsp. of brown miso.  When the soup had simmered for about ten minutes and the noodles softened, it was ready.  I ate it with Hoisin Sauce and Shirachi red chili cause and a cup of green tea and read the recent interview of Obama in Rolling Stone magazine.  A pretty good lunch for a throw together.

When Suzette arrived home at around 6:00 p.m. it was time to get the three large bags of candy and music ready for the hundreds of small trick or treaters who visit our neighborhood starting as sunset every year.

Our Huning Castle Neighborhood is a popular, major attraction for two very different groups of people for two very different reasons on two very special nights of the year.  One is Christmas Eve when every house decorates its yard with luminarias when people pilgrimage to Old Town and the County Club area to celebrate the coming of the Christ child by walking or driving the streets of our neighborhood to view the yards filled with luminarias and decorations.  The other wonderful evening is Halloween when children of all ages dress up in their most creative costumes and trick or treat from door to door.

We usually buy three or four large bags of individually wrapped chocolate bars of candy at Costco to give out.  So at around 6:30 p.m. the first of our small visitors arrived.  Every year Suzette and I come up with a question that we ask before giving a treat and this year Suzette came up with the question, “What are the names of the persons running for President?”  We love to ask a question because it breaks the monotony of just handing out candy and often opens up interesting insights into a child or parent who accompanies them’s thinking.  This year we got some great answers, like “Captain America” and “That other guy”.  Most of our visitors are from lower income families that live in the areas near our home and most of them seemed to be for Obama, so asking this year’s question gave us an opportunity to feel good that we were subtly getting out the vote.   I noticed that this year I had resisted eating the Halloween candy until Halloween night and then I ate lots of candy as Suzette gave out bags of it.   As Suzette and I ate candy and gave out candy and queried kids, I realized that Suzette and I were really enjoying sharing with our visitors the joy associated with Halloween, this special celebration of and for

the kid in all of us, as each of us connected with our childhood memories and thrill of celebrating Halloween and trick or treating and gorging ourselves on lots of cheap candy.   

By about 8:00 p.m. all of our 500 pieces of candy were gone, so we closed the door and turned off the porch light.  I asked what Suzette she wanted for dinner and she said, “I do not want to cook.  How about a pizza?”  So we decided to call Old Town Pizza Parlor and order a pizza.  We looked at their menu on line and decided that we would order a plain 16” cheese pizza ($11.99) and add our own toppings.  Suzette suggested some of her homemade pesto and I called Willy and he agreed to pick up the pizza on his way home from the gym.  So I started heated a large skillet with a bit of olive oil and cut up the last two slices of Genoa salami, about 2 oz. of slices and diced red onion, 1 oz. of Spanish Manzanilla olives, 2 oz. of PPI sautéed Italian sausage, some chopped garlic greens from the garden, and three sliced portabella mushrooms.  Then Suzette found and added a couple of Tbsp.s of pesto. These ingredients when sautéed together for a few minutes made a very pleasing medley of flavors.  I then gathered several opened bottles of red wine, including a Valley of the Moon Sangiovese, a Hafner Cabernet Sauvignon, and a 2008 Zichichi Family Vineyard from Healdsburg, CA’s Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.   

When Willy arrived with the box of pizza, we each plated slices and garnished them with the topping medley.  I heated mine in the microwave until it sizzled and the ingredients sank into the melted cheese.  We were in a great kidlike mood as we ate our hot fresh pizza with glasses of red wine and watched Colbert Report and John Stewart’s hilarious antics.

Bon Appètit