Category Archives: Themes

Special themes

NQN’s Hellish Halloween Party!

halloween food recipes

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…).

halloween food recipes

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!

halloween food recipes

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! ;) ”

halloween food recipes

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…

halloween food recipes

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…

halloween food recipes

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

halloween food recipes

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.

halloween food recipes

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

halloween food recipes

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…

halloween food recipes

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 ;)

halloween food recipes

Smokey pumpkin cheese ball

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108 comments | October 24th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella

Haunted House Cupcakes

When I was a child, every day on the way from primary school I would stop off at the library. It was on the way home and I loved to pop in and make oogly eyes at the albino axolotl in the tank and borrow some books. I do like a book series-there is something comforting about seeing the same characters doing different things and I suppose that is why I enjoy television series so much more than I do movies at the moment many of which seem like either variations of popular movies, sequels or remakes.

When I was in primary school my favourite series about Dorrie the Little Witch by Patricia Coombs (that is before Sweet Valley High took over!). Dorrie was living the life that my small self wanted to have. She had her own transport (a broom) a cat called Gink and a whole lot more adventures than I experienced.  She met goblins and ghosts and lived in a witch’s haunted mansion with her mother and “cook” … and how much did I want a live in cook to cook for me!

haunted house cupcakes

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93 comments | October 20th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella

Rat Plague Brownie Bites!

rat plague brownie bites

I was standing in my kitchen basking in a wonderful mood. Sadly for those around me (the plants) I was singing off key and trilling as if I didn’t have a care in the world.

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year…” I sang. And then a packet of dried red lentils, without any visible prompt or nudge, fell off the counter in protest, probably of my singing.

rat plague brownie bites

“Ahh Hallowe’en ghouls, I do adore you” I said. I picked up the dried lentils and continued making my Hallowe’en snacks-chocolate rats made from double chocolate brownie mixture. I had originally intended to put them on pop sticks but my order of sticks hadn’t arrived in time and then I realised the best way for me to style these would be gnawing on an arm. I still remember visiting Kryal Castle’s “Wax of Torture” museum when I was younger and seeing all sorts of gruesome things there. The one exhibit that sticks in my mind was the one where a man was being tortured with a box of rats on his stomach and they had set the box on fire so the rats had to eat through him. That sort of thing tends to stick in your memory…

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95 comments | October 11th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella

Turducken: The Method To Some Sort of Madness

turducken christmas recipe

It is sitting in front of me face down, haunches up, goading me. I pry the legs apart but they modestly snap back together. It is a beautiful specimen and I hold up a knife to the goose fleshed skin and it retracts and follows the sharp blade. “Aren’t you a pretty one?” I say to it quietly.

“Do it, do it” it says back to me.

I grab a pair of shears, run my fingers down its backbone feeling the knobs of bone and cartilage against my fingers and murmur “This won’t hurt a bit dear” before savagely slicing through it’s skin and bone with the shears. It’s a particularly brutal act, made even more difficult by the size of the beast at over 7 kilos but it’s a necessary one. Although once I started cutting with the shears I wondered whether I had done the right thing. After hacking back and forth through the thick bone I remove the backbone and connected neck with a triumph raising it high but feeling like a serial killer at the same time that has eviscerated someone.

I haven’t turned Dexter. I’m making a turducken. For Christmas in July of course. Northern Hemispherans might wonder what on earth Christmas in July is and as far as I know, it is a Southern Hemispheran’s way of celebrating Christmas when our weather is at its coldest. Instead of our usual hot Summer’s Christmas of salads and seafood, having on in July means that having things such as baked mega turkeys make sense.

What is a turducken? Well you may have heard of it mostly in America which is the land of over the top excess (which is incidentally why I would love to live there ;) ). It’s origins are originally Ancient Roman and it was then taken up by the French in the 1800s, in a dish called a “Rôti Sans Pareil” or “Roast without Equal.” A large deboned bird is stuffed with progressively smaller, deboned birds the smallest being tiny enough to fit an olive in and nothing else. This version, a more user friendly version made popular recently, is a deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken, hence the name Tur-Duck-En as a portmanteau of the three bird’s names.

turducken christmas recipe

I was sent a glorious free range Thirlmere turkey and cranberries from the U.S. cranberry institute and if I had any sense I would have simply roasted it whole along with some lovely cranberry stuffing. But because I am something of a masochist for punishment (and it turns out also a sadist considering what I did with the turkey) my inner Franck Eggelhoffer came out and said “Let’s make zis a Christmas in July to remember! Ja? Faaabulous!”

Queen Viv and her son Michael and his fiancee Terri who were here on holidays were invited along to come along. A day before I decided to brine the turkey to keep it moist. Since I was sent the turkey I couldn’t ask for them to debone it for me. I had deboned quails before and spatchcocks and they were, anatomically speaking, a smaller version of the turkey. So I knew my way around them but I also knew that as a vastly larger bird it would require strength that my upper body doesn’t possess readily. I really needed Dexter or Jack the Ripper to do it.

turducken christmas recipe

In the absence of a serial killer friend I set aside a large space on my workbench and cut and sliced away. It took about 30-40 minutes all up to debone the seven kilo beast but that was including time to wash my hands and take photographs. After huffing, puffing, swearing, pushing and pulling I removed the final touch, the wishbone triumphantly and plunged the turkey into its brining solution made up basically of salt, sugar, apple cider vinegar and whatever herbs I had handy and some black peppercorns. The brining solution would help to keep the meat moist. Afterwards I slumped down at my desk exhausted clutching a glass of something stiff (for me an apple juice and soda water, I needed my wits about me).

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74 comments | July 19th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella

Eyeball Cupcakes For Friday the 13th!

eyeball-cupcakes

Hello fellow ghouls! Guess what special day is tomorrow? That’s right, it’s Friday the 13th! Never mind that nothing bad had ever really happens to people on that date. I take note of the date because it gives me an excuse to make something deliciously ghoulish. I mean Hallowe’en is soooo many months away!

This year’s Friday the 13th eyeball cupcakes are for Mr NQN’s colleagues at work. They have all learned the hard way that he is nothing but the naughtiest trickster who delights in playing tricks on them. He will literally turn anything into a chance to play a prank on some unsuspecting soul. A few weeks ago, one of his colleagues was walking down a street in the city when he found a memory card on the ground. Curious, he took it back to work and put it in his computer. In it he saw that there were surveillance files from a government agency.

eyeball-cupcakes

Nervous, he told a few of his colleagues about it including Mr NQN (big mistake-huge! I hear you say and you’d be right). Mr NQN’s ears grew pointy and his nose long and a cheeky grin spread across his face. He quietly slipped his mobile phone out of his pocket and switched it on silent. Around the corner he texted his colleague with the message.

“We know what you have…”

His colleague was nervy and decided to go for a walk with another workmate, a tall man. Mr NQN saw this and then texted him

“Don’t be alone with tall agents.”

Then unable to resist with more cryptic texts “I know what you did last Summer.”

By now his colleague was on the verge of wetting his pants, seeing possible snipers on every rooftop. That’s when Mr NQN pounced with his last message.

“Orders are to take you out”

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77 comments | May 12th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella