Getting into the Halloween Spirit

It has been quite a while since I picked a 'recipe book of the month'. I invented this concept when I realised I was in a bit of a food rut, cooking a limited number of dishes, albeit influenced by the seasonal veg that arrive each week in my veg box. This seems ridiculous when I have shelves of recipe books and folders stuffed with hundreds of recipes torn from magazines.

The idea is to pick a recipe book or folder from the shelf and adopt it as my recipe book for the month. The challenge is to cook just two recipes from it, which is a fairly low commitment. However, I tend to end up thumbing through every page to select the two recipes and this invariably reacquaints me with lots of other recipes, even if I don't end up cooking them immediately.

However, the same green recipe folder had been sitting on the book holder in the kitchen for about three months and I decided it was time for a change. I selected Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Veg Everyday and have already made more than two things from it. However, last weekend could have seen the perfect combination of why I get a veg box and why I began recipe book of the month. Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I get a weekly veg box, but one of them is to challenge myself to not always buy the same veg, regardless of the season. Can you see a theme emerging here - getting into a rut and setting myself a challenge to get out of it?!

Anyway, with beetroot in the veg box and Hugh's veg recipes on the go, I turned to the book's index, selected beetroot and began choosing from the options. I was looking for something savoury but soon spotted Chocolate and Beetroot Ice Cream and, with my nephew staying and willing to claim half the calories, I decided to give it a go.

Oh-My-Goodness.... what can I say other than we can't wait for the next delivery of beetroot!

The recipe calls for 4 egg yolks and so I was, rather annoyingly, left with 4 egg whites. However, inspired by the October issue of the Sainsbury's Magazine I decided to make Halloween themed meringues.

Something spooky came out of the oven!

...with something amazing from the freezer

I have to say that I just can't look at the ghostly meringues without smiling, although perhaps they do look more scared to see us than we are probably supposed to be in seeing them.

The success of the meringues made us extend an invitation to my parents to join us today for a Halloween themed Sunday lunch. I do admit that the menu was chosen more for the individual dishes being either themed or family favourites rather than for how well they would sit together. As a result, four hours later I am still fit to burst. However, it was definitely delicious and fun.

We began with Black Magic Martinis: sweetened espresso, spiced rum and vermouth garnished with an eye ball (lychee).

Main course was a mummified sausage pie served with braised red cabbage and monster mash (mashed potato garnished with red onion wedge 'claws' and Gouda 'cobwebs').

Cheesy eyes peaking through the pastry 'bandages'

To finish it just had to be spiced hazelnut treacle tart with cream.

Unfortunately today's batch of gluten-free pastry was a complete disaster (as you can see from the treacle tart) so I must remember to never use that recipe again. However, that means I do need to remember which recipe I normally use. I'd better get searching and perhaps decide which book will be November's recipe book whilst I'm at it.