One of the best things about growing your own food is being able to feed your friends and family with the delicious produce. For a bit of fun, here are three Halloween themed recipes to try out – you might even have grown the necessary ingredients in your polytunnel for the ultimate, gruesome, home-made feast. If you have not grown the ingredients required this year – perhaps this could also inspire you to grow more in your polytunnel next year.
A hearty bowl of gloop is just the thing to fill up your monsters, big or small, this Halloween. This thick, satisfying soup will taste so much better if you call it gloop and its rich, orange colour will appeal even to many fussy little eaters. This is a great way to use up the pumpkin scooped from any pumpkins you plan to use for carving as decoration, along with other veggies from your polytunnel or in storage. Roast pumpkin or squash before adding to your pot for better flavour. Fry onions and garlic in a pan, then simply add your roast pumpkin, some chopped carrots and coconut milk and blend it to a smooth, thick consistency, adding coconut milk slowly to get the desired thickness.
For a macabre meal for Halloween night, why not create some 'brains' to devour. Really, this is just cauliflower florets boiled with beetroot and then added to a curry base. To make the curry, fry onions and garlic in vegetable oil with cumin, turmeric and dried chillies (make it as hot or mild as you wish). Add cauliflower, beetroot and a little vegetable stock and serve the curry – sorry, 'brains' - with rice or flatbreads.
Beetroot can also be used to stain the pasta – spaghetti or some other long, thin variety, that will be the wriggling worms in your 'compost' bake. Make a green leaf pesto with whichever spinach-like greens and herbs you have to hand, garlic and olive oil (extra points if you have managed to grow some olives!). Throw some mixed seeds and plenty of extra greens – kale, cabbage etc. into a dish and layer in some tomato paste and the pesto with your pink pasta and greens. Top with a crust of breadcrumbs, drizzle on some olive oil and bake.
