White chili smiley faces – Is it winter comfort food time already?

Many years ago, I had a white chili at someone else’s house and fell in love with it.
 
As with most first loves, any attempt at love after that is never the same again. It doesn’t make it bad by any means and often times it can be so much better even, but you’ll never recreate the feeling of that first one.
 
That’s how my relationship with white chili is. I have tried making it myself several times. I have ordered it at restaurants. And it’s “okay” but it’s not the same.
 
I actually really enjoyed this particular chili (sorry, don’t know which recipe I used, though!), but it still didn’t have the heat of that first white chili I tried. That’s even with me having the second bowl down there with all that added pepper, in addition to it already having plenty of spice in it, plus onions.
 
Ah well.
 
At least they were all smiling, right?

 
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Giant Halloween pumpkin burger – Trick or treat?

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.

It’s both a Halloween trick and a treat, no?

The girls love burgers, so I thought it’d be a blast to make an extra large one. It was Fall of 2009 and it was probably one of the first times I went on a true pumpkin kick. I was loving “look alikes” at the time, too, so it just fit, don’t you think?

Anyway, I’ll leave you with the pictures. Details of how I made it are at the bottom. 

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.  

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.

Giant fake burger made out of a whole pumpkin to look like the bun with a large burger patty and toppings inside. Pumpkin seeds glued to the outside to look like a sesame seed bun.  
Burger with cheddar cheese, sliced pickles, red tomatoes, and iceberg lettuce.  Ruffle potato chips on the side.

“Bun” – Carve the pumpkin in half. By “carve,” what I really mean is that I had to fight with it and a butcher knife until I finally won. It was close, though. This isn’t the same as being able to slice off the top for a jack-o-lantern or throwing a pumpkin to bust it into chunks. Trying to get it perfectly even down the middle was a pain in the butt. Ugh. Worth every minute, though. The pumpkin seeds were turned into fake sesame seeds by gluing them on top to look like a real burger bun.

Meat – A mix of beef and turkey so that it wasn’t as greasy as pure beef would’ve been. That meant I could get a full patty to hold together instead of it breaking apart. I cooked it on a large round cookie sheet and let it cool just slightly before sliding it onto the ‘bun.’

Toppings – Tomatoes, pickles, lettuce, cheese…. nothing special here. The cheese was left in small slices and not spread across the entire thing so that it made it easy to serve individual burgers after we deconstructed it.

Serving – I cut it into jagged squares-ish, based loosely around the cheese and tomato slices fell and let each person reconstruct their own burger on a regular bun. Then they could add their own condiments and trade toppings they don’t like to other people before eating. You could easily toss them in a toaster oven to melt the cheese more or add the cheese to the whole patty before putting the burger together in the first place. I wasn’t sure how well it would hold my first time, though.

Halloween party foods – Mummies in a blanket

Halloween mummies made with hot dogs and biscuit dough

Pretty cute, huh?

They didn’t start off that cute, though.

I tried several different styles of wrapping before I settled on one that worked.

Halloween mummies made with hot dogs and fridge biscuit dough - uncooked

The ones in the upper left hand corner are how they showed to do them in the tutorial I was looking at. They ended up looking more like Taliban mummies instead, though, and the dough kept slipping.

Halloween mummies made with hot dogs and refridgerated biscuit dough - uncooked pigs in the blanket

Actually, the biscuit dough kind of slips regardless. If you try to bundle it up on the bottom, then it ends up unraveling sometimes or just “falling off” entirely, which doesn’t really finish the look off very well, does it? Ultimately, I settled on just 2-3 strips for the cap and using the rest around the lower 2/3rds until it looked more like a coiled up snake than a turban.

Mummies for Halloween - Refrigerated canned biscuits and hot dogs like pigs in blankets

I like the final results of them that way better, too. The bottom row looks much better than the top row does. The first three are a jumbled turban/diaper mess and the last one looks like a swaddled baby. Oops.

Halloween mummy with hot dog and biscuit wrapped around it

I ran into the issue of what to put the eyes on with, too, though. We eat pigs in the blanket with ketchup. It makes sense to dip hot dogs in that, right? So I wanted to use that as the decoration as well. I much prefer when my creations are actually edible as is, but ah well.

Turns out, the mustard works out a lot better because it shows up on the hot dog:

 
Halloween mummy with biscut dough turban - pigs in blankets
 
Too bad some of the mummy ‘butts’ kept falling off regardless of how I had wrapped them, though. Oops!
 
To make your own, cut hot dogs in half. Open a can of refrigerated biscuits. Roll each biscuit dough circle into a “snake” like you used to do with playdough. Wrap around the upper 1/4 and lower 2/3 of each hot dog half, using whatever wrapping technique works for you. Have the kids do it instead if you’re self-conscious about yours turning out funky. Cook based on your biscuit package directions and add eyes using whatever condiments you prefer.