Halloween

Boo!

I told you I loved Halloween!

And what would a Halloween celebration be without Blood Red Punch? It would be boring, that's what.

Seriously, a Halloween party needs a scary drink. However, if you are a Halloween nut like me, you don't need a party to make a wicked drink.

My kids love this punch anytime but love the ice cube spiders more. I always make a couple trays of these cubes in October and pop them into whatever they are drinking. They love it...and so do I.

This punch is kid-friendly (alcohol-free) but can be easily transformed into an adult beverage.

Each holiday comes with it’s own brand of unpleasantness and disappointment.  New Year’s Eve offers forced joviality along with the prospect of being French kissed by a blowzy stranger with Cold Duck on her breath.  Christmas means spending lots of thought and money on presents for people who already have way too much stuff and enduring long hours with folks you’d never spend five minutes with if you didn’t share a smidge of DNA.     

However, most holidays also have an upside.  Thanksgiving often brings out the charitable side of people who donate to food drives and volunteer too serve dinner to those in need.  Easter signals the final days of winter and sometimes the final round of the Masters.

Then, there’s Halloween, the holiday, with no redeeming features. For starters, it’s not even a proper “holiday” because nobody gets to miss school or work. 

I live in West Hollywood, where Halloween is like a national holiday – arrangements for street closures have been made well in advance and people from all over will come watch the flagrant and the flamboyant, the political and the theatrical,  the absurd and the sublime march along Santa Monica Boulevard, from La Cienega to Doheny. Candy is not an integral part of this spectacle and frankly that's the only thing that rankles me about it.

One year, the Wicked Witch of the West wheeled along the Boulevard with an enormous crystal ball that housed terrorized miniatures – Dorothy, Toto, and the other Oz pilgrims were all cowering on the yellow brick road within her bubble. Another year, there were several Menendez brothers, wearing blood covered v-neck sweaters and conservative haircuts. Then another year, there were groups of huddled Titanic musicians playing desperately as their ship was sinking (or, I should say, as the parade was passing them by).

Despite my family of garlic haters, I love garlic. And I love lots of it in all forms. A very close older family friend eats it raw and rubbed on toast, then spread with butter or rendered duck fat. It's now his daily health ritual since he learned garlic has been shown to keep the heart healthy and keep cancer at bay. Maybe he knows a thing or two, because he's going to be 90 next year. Sometimes I even indulge in a slice of garlic toast too. Though I try to keep the practice at a minimum because I don't want to go around smelling. Even so, almost all my cooking and the recipes on this site start with sautéing garlic. Garlic is just one of those vegetables that many people use and it crosses many cultural boundaries. It's a base flavor in Mediterranean, Asian, and North African cuisine. I have always wanted to use garlic for something more than just a base, instead a main ingredient.

A few weeks ago I had the idea of making garlic soup. With the chilly weather here in the Northeast, I was craving a warming and comforting soup packed with flavor. But when thinking about garlic soup, 'comforting' might not be the exact word that comes to mind for everybody. Most people hate garlic for its pungent taste and odor, but boiling it really tames its pungency. The garlic becomes mellow but still keeps all the wonderful properties of its unique flavor. Another bonus of this preparation is that there is much less smell after eating compared to sautéed garlic. Garlic haters might actually change their minds after eating this soup.