Halloween in August-8/14/11

 I'm sure you've heard of Christmas in July...but Halloween in August?  And what cooking magazine is doing that theme?  Well no, Halloween in August is not a new trend, and no cooking magazine is doing a spread on it. 
I've loved doing the cooking magazine reviews each month in the past but for a number of reasons, I've decided to change it up a bit on my blog.  Sure, I'll still review recipes from cooking magazine, though I won't necessarily use a current issue or even a magazine recipe.  For example, tonight I made Sweet Potato and Zucchini Bread  ( link here) from a November 1992 issue of Bon Appetit.  I do save old cooking magazine but not that old.  I found this recipe on Epicurious, my favorite recipe site. (link here)  I had zucchini and sweet potatoes and simply put both words in their search box.   This recipe is for bread but you can see I made muffins and had great results too.  This was actually the second time I did this recipe this week.  Earlier I made bread and learned a little bit more about how to make this recipe successful.  First of all, make sure you do not add more than the recommended amount of zucchini or sweet potato.  It doesn't bake up well and is very wet.  Also, the reviewers on the site are right.  Use less sugar, I used a cup and a half instead of two and you can reduce the oil to 1/2 cup or use 1 stick of softened butter.  I made these muffins with 1 cup white flour and 1cup whole wheat and it worked just as well as all white.  These are a great bread muffin for any time of the year and since zucchini is cheap right now, give them a try.
Wait, you say, what about the title...and these random Halloween pictures?  Well, I wasn't kidding about mixing it up.  I will be adding some new elements to this blog and I'll start by harkening back to last Halloween.  I told you in the previous post that one of the things that kept me busy while I was ignoring blogging over the last year was being a room mom for Eyrleigh's preschool.  As room mom I, along with the other room moms, am in charge of the 4 classroom parties for the year.  As a teacher, I loved coordinating our class parties but found them pretty stressful.  I had to keep kids busy, moms happy, all while planning around teaching "real" subjects like math and reading.  Being a room mom for Eyrleigh's class, all I had to do was plan the parties and boy, is that fun!
One of my close friends and fellow room moms is the parent of a little boy in Eyrleigh's class.  This adorable little guy, Jacob, has lots of food allergies and Lori wanted our parties, understandably, to include only foods Jacob could eat.  So our parties had to be fun and yummy while avoiding nuts, eggs, dairy, and wheat. 
 The Halloween party was the first party of the year and Lori and I agreed that it made sense to make all the food ourselves in Lori's kitchen to ensure there was no cross-contamination or accidental allergens.  So instead of asking for food from parents, we asked for a $5 donation per party to defray costs.  This worked pretty well, although we often spent more than $60 because some of the items were pricier specialty items. 
The first Halloween themed picture above is just  simple gift boxes I made for Eyrleigh's teachers.  I bought cheap wooden boxes at Michael's, painted them black, wrapped them with Halloween ribbon, and glued on some cut-outs that were on sale.  I filled the boxes with Halloween candy and had Eyrleigh give them to Ms. Tracy and Ms. Kathy.  I was a teacher so I'm big on little teacher gifts.
The second picture is the kids' gift bags.  The plastic cauldrons I've had forever and I have no idea where I got them.  The bags were actually Walmart.  I am NOT a Walmart fan but I have to say their Halloween stuff this year was pretty cute.  We filled the bag with a pencil, bubbles, erasers, and Dum Dum candies (allergy friendly), again all from Walmart.
The best part of the party was of course, the food.  Lori was the creative genius on this one.  She uses websites to research which foods not only do not contain allergens but carry no risk of cross-contamination (products made on same equipment as those with allergens).  One of the best candy companies for allergy friendly foods is Spangler Candies.  The cupcakes pictured above are actually Spangler Candy Peanuts (link here) on top of Cherrybrook  Gluten Free Cupcakes (link here) with Cherrybrook Chocolate Frosting (link here).  The pumpkin stems are Glutino pretzels (link here).  These cupcakes are super cute and everyone can eat them.

 It's hard to see the detail in the next picture but we made our own chips for the kids.  These were the simplest part of the whole meal.  All we did was use a bat cookie cutter to cut out corn tortillas and fried them in oil.  We used vegetable oil since Jacob is not allergic to soy, the main ingredient in most vegetable oils.
 Another simple part of our party meal were the Jello pumpkins.  Again, we just made a batch of Jello and used pumpkin cookie cutters to cut out the shapes.  Our preschool is associated with a Methodist church so none of our students had pork restrictions.  If you have vegetarian, Jewish, or  Muslim students who can't have gelatin, here is a link for pork-free gelatin here. 

My favorite cute food of the whole party was also one of the healthiest.  We cut the tops of oranges and  took the segments out which, with a bit of practice, was easier than you would think.  I used a grapefruit spoon to get it started then pulled out the "orange part" and the white pith around it.  We then cute out eyes, nose, and mouth just like you would a pumpkin.  They made the cutest little fruit cups.
  I don't know why I didn't get a picture of this but Lori also made meatballs as a main dish for both the kids and adults at the party.  Each child is required to have an adult attend the party so we had calculated for adults to eat as well.   I found a number of allergy free meatball recipes on the web so you can find one you like through Google. 

Unlike adults who can have food alone and call it a party, things are different with a 2-year-old preschool class.  We have four room moms in this class, seems a bit of overkill for a class of 12, but it's fun to work together.  We agreed early to divide the party into 4 parts and each take a part.  Besides food, we had a game time, craft time, and story time.
I didn't get a picture of the craft we did.  Maybe it was the excitement of the first party or just ignorance that I would want to post pictures of what we did but I got nothing.  The paper plate pumpkin I show here is an example of our craft.  Since this is a two-year-old class, we painted paper plates orange beforehand.  With older kids you could have the kids paint them but 2-year-olds, paint, and Halloween costumes are all a very bad combination, particularly since the party was before Halloween and the costumes would be needed again in a few days for trick-or-treating.  We also precut the shapes for the mouth, nose, eyes, stem, and leaves out of felt.  All the kids needed to do was put the cutouts in the "right" places and glue them on.  Notice right is in quotes because most kids had a very abstact looking pumpkin by the end.  You could tell whose parents helped the most, let's just put it that way.  We put the loose shapes for each pumpkin together in baggies so each kid had a bag of the right shapes to begin with to avoid confusion.

I did the games so I have good pictures of those.  I was pretty sure 12 kids doing one thing would be chaos at this age and I was right.  It was tough enough to keep 6 of them in line so I was glad I had two games and the groups switched after a few minutes.  Organized games are really tough at this age so I choose two really simple things and let them work on taking turns (also VERY tough at this age).  The first game was a variation of Pin The Tail On The Donkey.  I called it "Catch The Flies".  I drew a spider web on large banner paper and glued on flies .  Then I stuck Velcro to the backs of die-cut spiders from the School Box store.  I put the fuzzy part of the Velcro on the flies and the kids had to take turns sticking a spider on a fly.  I did 24 flies and spiders so each kid got to do it 4 times before they switched activities.  It was super simple, not hard to explain, and they again practiced taking turns.

The second game was also really simple.  I bought a cheap piece of plywood from the hardware store and painted a large pumpkin.  I cut out the eyes and the mouth and found two squishy balls we had at the house.  Each child got to try to throw the balls through the pumpkin's eyes or mouth.  Glad we had the parents there for this one.  Guess who chased the balls?!  This game just rotated through until the spider game was done and worked again on the ever difficult "taking turns".
We also had a story time.  We actually did the story right after the food so the parents could wipe down the tables and set out the craft.  We did the games last so we could do another round if we had too much time.  Thankfully, our class had playground time at the very end of the day so we were able to send them out to play at the end of every party and do a good job cleaning up without corralling kids.  We had a few stories too but if I remember correctly we only ended up reading one because of time and kid attention span.  The one we read, Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, was perfect for kids this age because it wasn't too long, had lots of rhyming, and even a part where the kids could participate. 
For our first party as room moms, Lori and I were really happy about how everything went.  The kids loved the food,and the craft, games, and story were age appropriate and relatively successful at holding the kids attention.  It's not the best picture of her but I know my little Princess Presto had a good time and she was really excited to have Mom at school with her.  Happy Halloween...really late...or maybe just a bit early!