Last night I threw my annual Halloween party – a smallish event (as I have a small house) for both kids and adults. I was originally thinking of making a Creole menu – but then my friend Arthur asked me to make empanadas, my signature dish. Arthur is moving away (darn him!) so I figured I’d owed it to him. That meant changing my menu, which wasn’t that big a deal, as I recycled many old favorites. I served.
-Tortilla chips with guacamole (storebought)
–Deviled eggs (Mike’s favorites)
–Meat empandas
–Chicken Satay
–Chocolate chocolate chip cookies
-Pumpkin pie (from Costco)
–Spider cake
The menu wasn’t very Halloweenish, but I wasn’t inspired this year. The food, however, was great. Mike loved the deviled eggs and was happy to have some leftover for today. The meat empanadas received raves – specially from Arthur. I was very happy with the chicken satay. I changed the recipe a little bit because I remembered that last time the sauce had been too spicy to eat. I used 1 Tbsp of red curry paste in the peanut sauce instead of the 3 I originally had written in the recipe – and 1 1/2 tsp of red curry sauce in the chicken marinade instead of 2. It was great, the chicken was only slightly spicy and the sauce was restaurant-quality. I’m going to modify my recipe to show this.
The cookies were pretty good, not spectacular but child friendly. I think next time I’d try another recipe, though, just to see if I can find something even better.
The cake turned out just like the one in the picture. Once again I used a bunt cake from Lucky’s (old Albertsons), good n’plenty’s cut in two for the eyes and a pink full good n’plenty for the nose. Kids loved it.
For drink we had water, coke, Tropical punch and wine. I don’t know what the first few bottles we had were (people brought them with them), but the latest was a 2005 Virgin Vines California shiraz which my friend Alistair in particular liked very much. I’m not one for Shiraz in general, but this one was very nice – even though it came with a screw cap (a la Australian wines). I’m pretty amazed that Virgin has gotten into wines as well, they seem bent on getting into every industry. In any case we enjoyed it.
The party went very well, we had as many adults and children as our house could accommodate and the kids seem to have a great time running around and playing. I was really surprise how 12 kids could not only fit in our house, but play so well together. Hurray for little kids!
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