Halloween at Ham House

I’ve never been much of a Halloween celebrator. I have put pumpkins in the window and got sweets and waited and the children have not knocked on the door anyway. And that’s the most I’ve done. This year, however, Ham House was in charge and they had an evening of fun planned that I couldn’t help but get caught up in.

After finishing our normal work day, we whipped out the crazy make-up and got ready for the evening.

The house looked fabulous, lit up against the dark sky.

(Just realised that the above photo doesn’t do it any justice at all.)

They had tons of good stuff happening in the house. Unfortunately, I was working in the Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun bar so I didn’t get photos so I’ll tell you about it.

There were séances happening in the attic, scary films showing in the chapel, a pair of real lungs hanging in the meat larder downstairs, mini ghost tours, a design-your-own-gravestone art workshop and a photo booth that made the photos look all old and faded and ghosty.

It was brilliant fun, if the mood of the customers in the bar was anything to go by.

The outfits were amazing too. Everyone had dressed up for the occasion and some people had really gone to town with it. One woman was dressed as a pumpkin and had somehow lit it from inside so as she wandered around the gardens, I could just see this massive orange ball. There were ninjas and witches, mime artists and dead brides, and everything in between.

I’ll try and see if anyone else at work got good photos and I’ll put them here for you to see.

An Italian feast – the carb light version

On Wednesday it was Halloween. Last year on Halloween, I got some sweets in and waited for the kids to come trick-or-treating.

They didn’t come.

I ate the sweets.

Apparently the thing you’re supposed to do is put something Halloweeny in the window or somewhere visible, to show you’re in on the fun. So this year, I got a few little pumpkins, put them in the window and planned to bake some goodies, flapjacks or something.

Well, then I got cooking for dinner as I had a friend coming over and didn’t get time to bake goodies for the kids, so good job no-one knocked! (I think I might be feeling a bit offended though. Why didn’t they want my sweeties?)

So I was back in the kitchen with my favourite cookbook, Polpo, by Russell Norman. My friend and I are both ex-Dukaners so try to not to go too mad on carbs. I definitely don’t avoid them, you can’t really, when eating like an Italian, but I just try not to have loads of them.

The antipasti was the carb-heavy part but I kept it out of the mains. Here’s the antipasti plate.

Top centre are my signature grissini sticks, wrapped in prosciutto and pickled chicory. To the left are music paper crackers. To the right is one of my favourite things in life ever, truffle butter, and just behind that, black truffle oil. In the white dish to the left is homemade basil pesto, in which I used pecorino and black truffle oil. Right at the front, the little pink squares are ham hock terrine and to the left are cherry tomatoes with a little shred of mozzarella and some torn basil on the top, then sprinkled with truffle salt. In the middle are little crostinis with ricotta, mint and broad bean on half of them and goat’s cheese, roasted walnut and grape drizzled with white truffle oil and thyme on the other.

For the mains, they unfortunately don’t photograph well so I will just have to tell you about them. I made a parmigiana with aubergines and courgettes, in which I used fresh basil and oregano where I usually use dried as the flavour is more concentrated. After having used just fresh this time, I think I will go back to using dried as the lovely oregano smells you usually get with a parmigiana definitely weren’t as strong. I also made a duck, black olive and tomato ragu which was far tastier than I expected. You spend about two and a half hours just slowly cooking the tomato sauce so the flavours are really strong and lovely. I also steamed some kale, spinach and fresh basil together as a side dish.

The dessert was vanilla panna cotta with blackberry coulis on top.

I also made something called a chocolate salami for having with the espressos I decided were a good idea at 9.30pm.

It is chocolate with egg yolks whipped into it, with crushed up sponge fingers, chopped dried fruit and loads of nuts. You just fridge set it until it is hard enough to cut in slices and have as little biscuits.

We then proceeded to have a super long chat about my visit to Mr Red Wine’s house. I must just add that I washed quite thoroughly, thirteen times, in between visiting Mr Red Wine and preparing this food!