Today we have a wind advisory and hail, with snow coming over night. I absolutely HATE wind, but I suppose the swirling leaves and unsettled skies — plus the queasy feeling they give me, as I imagine the tree crashing through our roof — are a good metaphor for how I’m feeling about the impending election.

Fortunately, yesterday was PERFECT for outdoor entertaining. High 40s, and, best of all, SUNSHINE. The big yellow maple which leans over our backyard from our neighbor’s was practically glowing in all the sun. (Its branches, already today, are nearly bare, and the big yellow leaves are scattered all over our yard.) The sky was blue, the air was fresh and only slightly breezy. Our yard was squashy from all the rain we’ve been getting, but the kids all wore rainboots. Their costumes got very muddy indeed, but they had a lot of fun.

The Poke a Prize game I created was a big hit. (It would be really fun to do for almost any birthday party or holiday – you’d just adjust the colors and shape you create accordingly.) It was also a LOT of work. First, I bought a bunch of little treats: candy, of course, but also spider rings and pumpkin erasers, and mini notebooks and hair clips and other little things I thought the girls would like. These LOL mini surprise balls were the biggest hit. Filling the cups was easy. Assembling the board, less so. I misunderstood the directions and bought crepe paper instead of orange napkins to disguise the cups and the prizes within, and it took me a million years to wrap each cup in crepe paper. A million. Years. Then our hot glue gun didn’t work, so I had to Gorilla Glue the cups to the poster board. And then a few cups refused to accept the Gorilla Glue, so I had to duct tape those on. It was a lot of work. Fortunately, since I didn’t have a birthday party to stress about this year, I had lots of pent-up craftiness to put toward this project. Carla helped me cut out letters, a stem, and a leaf to glue to the board.

My plan had been to just have the kids take turns poking the cups and extracting the prizes, but my husband suggested that we make the game a little more challenging to make it more FUN. So Carla and I cut up little pieces of paper and wrote on them either “TREAT! Poke a prize!” or “TRICK!” and then a little activity they had to do before they could poke a prize. Things like, “Hop like a bunny!” and “Yell the ABCs!” and “Go down the slide!” The kids drew a slip of paper from a trick-or-treat pumpkin bucket, read the instruction, and collected their prizes. They had a really good time. 

They also enjoyed their “treasure hunt,” which was just running around the yard collecting the 15 little goodie bags I’d filled with candy, barrettes, and Halloween-themed erasers. 

The food was good. Our kitchen table is right next to the sliding doors that lead to the porch, so I just set up the crockpot and other food on the table, and people could just barely enter our house to fill their plates. Usually, I feel like I make way too much food. But there was practically nothing left by the time our friends went home, so I think everything went over well.

This chicken, mushroom, and wild rice soup won a lot of praise from my friends, which was very gratifying. The recipe makes a TON of soup, and it was all gone by the end of the evening. The six of us GOBBLED it up. If you need a warm, hearty fall/winter soup that you can cook in the crockpot, I cannot recommend this enough. The hardest part of this soup is chopping the veggies for the mirepoix and the mushrooms. Also, near the end you make a quick roux and add milk and half and half to thicken the soup, and that’s a teeny bit of a pain. Otherwise, it is super easy. Despite some comments on the recipe saying that the rice gets mushy after eight hours in the crockpot, I use Lundberg wild rice, and just dump it in at the beginning like the recipe says, and it has always come out perfectly. Also, the recipe suggests putting the mushrooms in 30 minutes before the end of cooking, and I do NOT do that — I just put them in with everything else right at the beginning — and it has always turned out beautifully. 

The daughters of our friends BOTH ate the soup, which seems miraculous to me. I think I’ve been able to cajole Carla to try a bite of tomato soup ONCE EVER and certainly she would never, ever even THINK of trying a soup with a bunch of stuff in it. 

The tried-and-true miracle no-knead bread was also a crowd pleaser. If you like bread, and if you like appearing to be a person who makes very fancy gourmet bread, then you MUST try this recipe. It is the easiest thing ever. Seriously, NO KNEADING. The only hard part is that you have to prep the dough twelve to eighteen hours before you want to cook it. And by “prep,” I mean mix flour, salt, yeast, and water together in a bowl, cover it, and let it sit. Aside from having to plan ahead, this bread is impossible to mess up and the result is soft and crusty and delicious.

My favorite fall salad remains a favorite. I buy these sweet and spicy pecans from Trader Joe’s, rather than making my own. The dressing is delicious and easy to prepare in advance, and really the worst part of making the whole thing is chopping the shallot. 

To make things harder on myself, as is my tendency, I searched for fancy fall cocktails to make for our guests. I found an apple and gin autumn cocktail that sounded kind of weird but workable. Weird in the sense that I’ve never once thought that gin and apple cider would go together. However, I love gin, and I love apple cider, and I wanted a fall drink that didn’t require me to buy bourbon or a bunch of other liquors/liqueurs that I don’t normally use. So I tried it. And it was DELCIOUS. It’s lightly apple-y and not too sweet and goes down very easy. 

The kids seemed to find the mummy hot dogs really charming, and making them was a fun project that Carla and I did together. Carla even ate half of her mummy, which was surprising. I am now realizing that I didn’t cut her hot dog for her, which probably made it hard for her to eat. Whoops. (Although it’s equally possible she just ate her weight in candy and had no room for hotdog, a food she is lukewarm on anyway.) (By the way, per the recipe, I did end up “gluing” candy eyes, leftover from the monster cookies, to the mummy dogs with ketchup, despite the whole thing making me very nauseated. I mean, ketchup with hot dogs?!?! Ew. Plus, candy eyeballs with hotdogs?!?!?!?! DOUBLE ew. But the kids did not care.)

I think the biggest disappointment of the evening was the monster cookies. Well, and I would rate them only HALF a disappointment, because a) they were very fun to make together with Carla and b) they were really cute. But they were not the most delicious cookies I’ve ever had. They mainly tasted like white cake mix, to me. (Which is because they are made with a box of white cake mix.) But the kids liked them, so I think overall they were worth trying. Plus, now we have a million candy eyeballs.

This was very likely the last entertaining of any sort we will do for the season, so I am really glad it went so well. We only needed to turn on our heater and put on winter coats once the sun went down behind our neighbors’ houses, no one froze to death, everyone had a good time, mud washes off, and the kids did not seem to miss trick-or-treating at all. 

I didn’t look to see whether there were a lot of trick-or-treaters on our street. My husband did remark that he saw a big group of kids and adults, and none of them were wearing masks, but that was it. After our friends left, and we’d washed the dishes and put the covers back on the deck furniture, I watched Interview with the Vampire on Hulu and then went to bed. 

Now I need to get up the energy to put away the Halloween decorations. And start thinking about Christmas, I guess.