There are certain things that you remember from childhood. Seeing your friend’s mother naked is one of them.

I should explain. My parents were and are very conservative. Particularly on some topics although on others, they don’t really care. But getting naked was not something that we as a family did (unlike Mr NQN’s family whose photo album has page after page of naked bottoms). My mother was a strict, knitting, cross stitching mother  who cooked food that my father liked and I thought all parents were like them.

I remember when I would visit a friend Erica’s place. Mother would say that Erica’s mum was “alternative” or “European”but as for me, she just seemed cool. I enjoyed being over there because Erica was allowed to do pretty much anything that she liked. Erica could eat donuts. Erica could play wherever she wanted. Erica could eat ice cream (are you sensing a food theme?). Until one day, we were playing and the electricity went out and we went squealing to her mother. She was in the bathroom and stepped out of the shower stark naked in front of us.

I had my first encounter with what I now know to be hippies.

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So there I was, waiting for a batch of blood for my annual Halloween party. Not the human kind mind you, but nevertheless a batch of blood. The only problem? It was about to arrive when I was going to have a meeting with my book publishers at Penguin to discuss publicity for my upcoming book.

“What am I going to do?” I asked Mr NQN. “It needs to be fresh, and I can’t pick it up any other time”

“Bring it with you to the meeting?” he suggested.

“I suppose, I can’t be the only author that has brought a bag of blood to a meeting, can I?” I reasoned.

Well as it turns out, blood isn’t the easiest thing to get and it ended up being late which saved me from a fate of explaining why I was carry half a litre of cryovaced pigs’s blood (well at least it wasn’t in a bucket and I wasn’t in a 70′s style prom dress I didn’t have said bucket tipped over me a la Carrie…).

Every year I look forward to my favourite time of the year, Halloween where I get to say goodbye to the pretty and embrace the ghoulishly morbid. This year for Halloween I ended up making 14 items – I know 13 is a lucky or unlucky number depending on who you talk to but an additional thing just slipped in in my excitement. I prepped the party for the week prior to it-I was holding it early as I wasn’t able to hold it on the last weekend of October and I also figured if anyone wanted to cook the recipes they would have time in order to make them. As I have for the past few years, I went to my favourite party supply store The Party People for items including a backdrop that would transform our neutral toned apartment into a dungeon and for good measure I hired a fog machine so that guests could be treated to the sight of a foggy, misty Halloween evening! I do love the delightfully creepy!

A few days before the party I sent around a little reminder to my guests:

“My dearest, darling ghoul
I’ve been busy mixing up spiders and gruel
For a Halloween night
That will give you a fright
See you on Saturday at 7pm, don’t forget there’s only one rule…

Please wear a costume! ”

Well I never laid claim to any poetic talents. So without any further dithering allow me, dressed as your Disneyland Haunted Mansion Maid wearing a costume made by my mother, to present you with my hellishly horrible Halloween party of 2011!

Press the doorbell to enter…

Blood punch

My esteemed guests, let us start with something to drink. Some blood punch Madam or Sir? Presented most delightfully in a clear blood fountain, the mistress of the manor likes to drink blood so she thought you might like to try some. Perhaps you’ll get a taste for it like she has…

Please help yourself to anything on the dining table…it’s all gruesomely edible…

Have you ever visited  a pet cemetery? Here is a haunted one made of an avocado, spinach and chickpea hummus dip where ghosts abound visiting tombstone crackers and pretzel fences keep them in.

If you haven’t visited a dentist lately I wouldn’t recommend these apple rotting teeth with caramel peanuts…

Watermelon brain

This was the brain of someone that displeased the mansion’s mistress. She’s a little despotic so she decided off with his head and that she would share it with all of you…

Oh dear, and here is the rest of the man that displeased the mansion mistress. Apart from being a despot she also has a nicer side and believes in nose to tail eating…So she thought that we should eat all of him from his bbq pork ribs to his spicy sausage intestines! With a bloody tomato sauce of course

Smokey pumpkin cheese ball

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I started to get paranoid when ever I turned on my computer. There were three emails in one week. Each offering me the services of a personal trainer. I looked around. *Gulp* Who reported me to the fitness police? Or was it that obvious that I was in need of a personal trainer? It was true that when people meet me they say things like “Oh you like dessert don’t you? I can tell from your blog” (although there was a small mercy in that they didn’t add “I can tell from the way that you look”).

I refused the advances of the personal trainers politely. I didn’t need that relationship yet. I used the excuse that I didn’t have time and I travel too much to be able to commit to it. But really I just didn’t want to be yelled at for being lazy and eating too much cake and rich food. And I also knew that even if I got one of those nice and kind trainers (if they even exist) then I just wouldn’t take them seriously unless they were yelling at me and frightening the croissants out of me! To make matters worse there has been a little update on the treadmill situation. You may perhaps remember that a while back I got myself a treadmill in an effort to stave off the consumption of goodies like cupcakes and pastries. Well it is now broken.

I know, don’t look at me that way. I didn’t kill it on purpose.

If I am to be totally honest I didn’t exactly kill it from overuse. One day I turned it on and suddenly it no longer worked. A part of me was happy that I got the reprieve from an afternoon’s workout on it but another part of me worried about refusing the P.T.s given that I was now treadmill-less.

I also worried about some items that I was about to bake. Cupcakes. Not just cupcakes but cupcakes covered in icing and then topped with a sugar cookie. It’s a good thing that I have skinny and active Mr NQN to do my fitness for me by proxy. Do you like how I just manoeuvred my way out of exercise? I’m sneaky that way

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