Frugal Friday | Halloween
I think I’ll have egg and chips for dinner tonight. It’s very frugal and means I can have something a little more gourmet on Sunday! It’s Halloween in 10 days and so we have to prepare; especially if you have kids. Food is an important part of any celebration and there are warming foods associated with Halloween. You can also make them a bit spooky! I once put dry ice into a punch on Halloween and it formed a nice mist on the surface!
Squashes are in season now and you can make a soup from them. I think French Onion soup is a nice warming soup too and easy to make. There are a number of recipes and some people even add cheese to it! I just fry the chopped onions until they are beginning to brown in a saucepan. Use a couple of onions for each bowl of soup (I use 10). Then crumble in a few Bovril cubes (one for each bowl of soup) add seasoning, water and d’Provence herbs; then simmer for an hour. Serve it up with crusty French bread or toasted bread (really yummy).
I was cooking baked potatoes once and they seemed to smell funny. Since then I’ve peeled them first because I suspect it was something they were sprayed with caused the horrible smell. If you peel them, you can carve them into a spooky shape and boil the bits you cut off. Baked potatoes are best served with sausages for Halloween. Cut the potatoes in half and insert a sausage (like a hotdog). Incidentally, your potatoes may have been sprayed with Bordeaux mixture even if they are organic. If they have dark patches on them (potato blight) be suspicious.
If you fancy a nice casserole on Halloween, why not do a sausage casserole? You do it similar to the soup but fry sausages with the onions and you don’t need so many onions. You can add other root vegetables like carrots and white cabbage too.
Roast chestnuts are traditional on Halloween and Guy Fawkes night too. Pop some in the oven with the baked spuds!
I helped to organise a Halloween party once and we cut bats out of cardboard and put then on a net suspended from the ceiling for a really spooky atmosphere. You can do spooky drinks too, like tomato juice based ones! Get a litre carton of tomato juice and make a bloody drink!
Kids can also make all sorts of spooky things like masks from cardboard, all that is needed is cardboard, scissors and a lot of imagination. You can do a lot with an old white sheet too! Have your digital camera handy to take photographs of the fun!
There are lots of games for Halloween like apple bobbing, I still have lots of Bramley apples on my tree! Trick or treat isn’t traditional in England but I might still get some kids doing it, so I might buy some sweets. I go to a traditional English sweet shop and it’s much cheaper than a supermarket. The sweets (candy) are much nicer too.
Everyone I talk to now is trying to be more thrifty and frugal. We are trying to save on the food bill, be careful heating our homes to save on energy costs and people are buying less luxuries. I went to a retail park and a lot of shops have closed down and the ones that are still open are having sales and offering better value for money. We need to have food and shelter but we don’t have to have smart 3D televisions, cable TV, smart phones and lots of other things that aren’t always worth the money. Sometimes people have to choose between new shoes or books for the children or an expensive smart phones for themselves; I think I would put the children first.
If you are looking for bargains like potatoes from Aldi and Lidl you might find my Thrifty blog helpful. I had mine from Aldi, the oven chips for 99p were OK too; some were small though and so watch they don’t burn. Aldi oven chips are much better than the ones from Lidl.
What do you do on All Hallows Eve? Do you carve your Jack o’ lanterns from a pumpkin or a turnip? Please, comment and let me know your traditions!
Have a Happy Halloween!
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Mike10613's Blog 
Hi Mike, Your food blogs always make me so hungry, I tend to rush off and cook before I comment! Thanks for reminding me of French onion soup. I love to make that and hadn’t in quite a while.
Living in America, we celebrate Halloween the traditional way with trick or treating and parties. When we lived in the UK, we lived in a neighborhood with a lot of Americans so many people from the international school would come to our neighborhood and trick or treat. I would make a big pot of chili and the parents would hang out at our house while the kids went trick or treating. I actually preferred celebrating there because it felt more special!
I love your idea of carving potatoes and using them as buns for sausages. Yummy! Okay, I just got hungry again. 🙂
25, October 2011 at 4:58 pm
Hi Carolyn,
Sausages on baked potatoes are yummy as the fat from the sausage gets absorbed into the potato! They are having trick or treat at the Black Country Living Museum on Saturday night. Children can go down a street of Victorian buildings lit by gas lamps trick or treating and get rewarded with sweets. It looks quite spooky –
http://www.bclm.co.uk/events10.htm
25, October 2011 at 5:08 pm
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