September 28, 2006:
Everything was perfectly normal at first. We were out food shopping, and as the woman pillaged through the aisles, grabbing the fifty-five different too-expensive cat-related items we seemingly "need" to purchase on a daily basis, I strolled alone with a happier gait, checking out the many new Halloween-themed foodstuffs littering the local Waldbaum's. I employ a team of hundreds to check every grocery store in the city for new Halloween items, but was surprised to see so much stuff I hadn't already bought, seen or at least heard about. Pleased, I hedged my bets and skipped down the usually droll napkin aisle, and sure enough, there was Bounty, slapping me five with a bunch of paper towels with haunted house graphics on them. Just as we were finishing up and readying ourselves for another two hundred dollar bill, I saw...this!
It's true. Hormel is now officially a player in the game of Halloween. Makers of all things meaty, Hormel has redressed their convenient resealable bags of pepperoni slices with spooky graphics, offering the packages in stores by way of a cardboard standee that even outclasses Halloween M&M's standees by four degrees of Halloweenosity. Seeing pepperoni get this sort of treatment is always exciting, but that's not why I'm writing about it. I maintain that companies must do more than add scary graphics to their packaging for us to credit them with having a "Halloween edition" of anything, and there was nothing in those bags except plain old regular pepperoni slices. Something else caught my eye, and ultimately, this "something" would force me to spend an additional 50 bucks on groceries.
Free for the taking were colorful little "Tricks For Your Treats" booklets, offering a bevy of recipes that help pepperoni conspire with other ingredients to make amazing Halloween appetizers. It took just one flip through the pages of skull-faced crackers and mummy-headed breadsticks to get me running back through the aisles to pick up all of the edible materials necessary to turn my regular night into a super pepperoni-laden fright night.
Hormel hired the right people to make simple things like pepperoni on Ritz crackers seem as good as carving pumpkins, and I can't forsee many people with real actual souls being able to look at these pages and not need to make everything on them. With money and time and "oh god this is too much attention being given to pepperoni" constraints working against me, I limited myself to just a few of the recipes, but even that called for enough ingredients for us to have to bring a second grocery wagon into the fray. I wasn't too embarrassed about that, but to frantically zip up and down the aisles holding a Hormel Halloween recipe book? No, I wasn't hoping to run into any old friends. I kept acting like we were gathering all this stuff for some kid's Halloween party, but considering that this all took place on September 27th, I don't think anyone was buying it. I knew I shouldn't have kept saying, "Man, I can't believe we have to get all this stuff!" Why did I have to push? :(
Here's the trick: Everything in the recipe book calls for Hormel pepperoni slices, even if it's perfectly clear that they're either not really needed or that the recipe was obviously more suited for another, less pepperoni-ish ingredient. I was willing to play by the rules, because if pepperoni could fill my night with the act of shaping pimento demons over Triscuits, it deserved a kickback.
Pepperoni was the focus, but you wouldn't believe how many other ingredients were necessary for simple cracker toppers. Because Hormel believes in the use of many colors to turn appetizers into horrifyingly disfigured creatures, the recipes required everything from olives to red peppers to green peppers to yellow peppers, to canned cheese to real cheese, to green onion to pizza bread, to holy fucking CHRIST, look how much crap I bought...
Not pictured: Another dozen or so ingredients. I was out of control, and I have to live with that..
Still, it was nice to indulge in a little "food face making" after so many years spent not making food faces. We all toy with the notion of adding a bacon smile to our eggs when they're first thrown in the skillet, but then everyone remembers that they like 'em scrambled. We all think that we're going to draw something on someone's cake for their birthday, but we hate making cakes and never get around to it. The only thing we might try to quirkily form is a pancake; alas, no matter how good you are at making the pancake mix settle into the pan in the shape of a parrot, it's still going to come out looking like ass. Good pancake shapes can only be performed by those who go to school for it. This recipe booklet is a good excuse to finally rekindle the lost art of turning food into things that look vaguely like heads, and if those heads are going to fall under Halloween's umbrella, that's just another reason to celebrate good times.
At least, that's how I justify what I've done in retrospect. At the time, I counted on my impossibly pumpkin-shaped orange pepper as a sign from God that I was meant to spend a lot of money and a whole night arranging ghosts out of cheese over low sodium Ritz crackers.
Some of the recipes were a bit complicated, needing ingredients that had to be frozen or defrosted or some other time consuming thing first. We just stuck with the basic entries. I long ago promised myself that I'd use chives and green onion to form facial features over a pepperoni cat head, and this was my one shot to make good.
Not too shabby, eh? Before I praise, I will punish: I like the finished products, but even with the half-hearted efforts I gave to the cracker creatures, they still took a heck of a long time to make. Like, way too long for someone without the ability to stop time to make a batch of. Maybe it's a speedier process for people who don't consider "cooking" as removing something from a box and nuking it, but I don't know...I can't see it.
Example: Check out the cat. He's called "Tidbit With A Tail." The book named him that, not me. Tidbit requires six different ingredients, and also challenges people to make small slices of green onion stand upright even though it takes a pact with Satan to do so. Getting chive "whiskers" to stay properly tilted in a glob of sour cream was no easy task, either. On the plus side, of all the crackers with cat-shaped toppings that I've eaten, Tidbit was by far the tastiest. Who knew green onions were so good? Who knew? From now on, I'm putting green onions on everything. I'll run around screaming "Farfetch'd" as I whip Charmander in the ass with them.
The pumpkin on the top left -- a "Pumpkin Smacker" -- uses Easy Cheese for the pumpkin shape. This taught me a few things. One, it's really hard to make pumpkin shapes with Kraft Easy Cheese. Two, you don't need Kraft Easy Cheese, because Nabisco now makes a Cheez-It version of it. Why hasn't this been reported on? I was happy to see Cheez-It nail a new persona, but at the same time, I really hope the competition doesn't cause the downfall of the Easy Cheese empire, because that stuff gave me way too many good nights of hot nozzle-in-my-mouth processed cheese action. I'd hate to see it go.
I couldn't get my "Gobblin' Ghost" (lower left) to look right, but my "Scary Sand-Witch" at least conveyed the notion of a head with a hat and eyes and hair and a mouth. I keep looking at it and leaning more towards Tom Petty than Generic Witchy, but that's okay. I'm totally fine with being the first person on the planet to build Tom Petty on top of crackers.
Though the creepy crackers take a while to make, it's not exactly hard work. When a certain ingredient isn't doing what the book says it should do, it's easy to substitute another and have the finished product look just as good. Perhaps with false confidence stemming from that, I got brazen, got stupid and tried to make a "Spooky Spider." The recipe said to use pretzel sticks for legs, but I only had Halloween-themed bat-shaped pretzel sticks, and breaking them into pieces wasn't working out as well as I'd hoped. Neither was anything else. I couldn't find the perfect balance of sour cream, and using sliced green olives in place of fresh peas for the eyes wasn't as brilliant as I swore it was. Ultimately, "Spooky Spider" came out looking like "Spooky Spider After Some Ape Stepped On It." I guess the death aspect is kind of Halloweeny, though.
After fiddling and flailing with crackers, we moved onto one of the recipe booklet's more ambitious projects. This recipe called not for just one slice of Hormel pepperoni, but for 400. This recipe could not be mastered with the help of mere Ritz crackers. This recipe required me to clean all of the dirty pans out of the oven. Was it worth it? YES! Why? Because the end result was PIZZA WITH A FACE! PIZZA WITH A FACE!
PIZZA WITH A FACE! A jack o' lantern face! A pumpkinheaded Boboli pizza! I'm not a tremendous fan of peppers on pizza, which is unfortunate since everything from the jack o' lantern's stem to its eyebrows were made of them. Come on, nobody gives real jack o' lanterns eyebrows. Forgiving the peppers, it really does come out looking nice, and serves as more proof that Domino's and Pizza Hut are both incredibly stupid to have never offered pizza deals with pepperoni shaped like pumpkin faces around Halloween. I picture them coming in black cardboard boxes, handed over by delivery boys dressed as reapers.
I have to admit it -- this was really fun. Worth the money. Worth the time. Worth the sacrifice of an entire loaf of Cracker Barrel cheese, because once you open that thing, there ain't no going back without a Ziploc bag, and we didn't have any. The entertainment value of this experiment is boosted tenfold if you can find the little booklets at your local supermarket, but if you can't, there's tons of pepperoni-influenced Halloween recipes on Hormel's official site. Actually, now that I look, there's even better recipes on the site than in the books. I feel like a sucker. A sucker who spent my life savings to turn Boboli into Bobooli.
