a calavera and a girl from a well

Happy Halloween! I had the lovely fortune to be invited to two parties this year where folks are v. serious about their costumes. I reprised La Calavera Catrina for the first party:


La Calavera Catrina, a proper Edwardian lady-skeleton.
Photo by Darrell, the fab party photographer.

I did a new costume for the second party. A bit of backstory here: I adore horror films. Practical-effect creature features and campy-as-hell sex'n'splatter flicks were the ones I grew up watching 'cause that's what was available from Blockbuster -- and I still have fun dissecting the effects shots and Freudian overtones in those sorts of movies. But they don't scare me. My best-favorite horror movies are quiet, tense, slow-build ghost stories because they freak me right the eff out, and I'm permanently impressed by any film that engenders earnest emotion.

I hid my TV for a week after I first watched "The Ring." Which is how, 10 years later, I wound up like this:


Samara/Sadako from The Ring/Ringu.
Photo by the even-gorgeous-undead Melanie.

I won the party prize for Scariest Costume. I don't even really like looking at this picture 'cause I creep myself out. Thanks, Japan, for creating my nightmares.*


Makeup!
Photo by one marvelous Matt!

All the makeup took a bit less than 2 hours, including a break to eat a sandwich and putter with a DVD-to-VCR transfer that never quite worked out. The design is by Audivila, whose excellent Samara makeup tutorial I followed every step of the way. Until I got to my limbs, at which point I just slapped on green-grey splotches surrounded by purple-black splotches 'cause my ride came a'knockin'.

I owe a few lunches to my friend Melissa, who made the dress in about four hours, from scratch, with no pattern.


Probably Samara's parents never bought her a puppy because she was evil.
Photo by Melanie again, yes.

The dog in this picture is actually cowering into me, away from people dressed completely innocuously. She's a rescue pup. She wasn't sure about the wig at first, but kept trying to lick all the makeup off my face once she figured out it was me under the wig.


*Though really, I find the American version much scarier than "Ringu." One of the few cases where a budget really helped, I think. However, I do appreciate that they're still making sequels in Japan. 'Cause in the latest, Sadako uploads herself into the cloud. And for the special edition disc set, they made a ridiculous photobook about Sadako taking a holiday.

recipe: s'mores icebox pie

I'm generally a proponent of making food from nothing more than recipe scraps, raw ingredients, motley kitchen equipment, and your own wits. Some days, that's just not feasible. Perhaps -- just for example, mind -- you spent the night before a potluck luncheon out until four in the morning watching Magic Mike and then, unrelatedly yet thematically, helping an erstwhile Atlantan introduce her new husband to the Clermont Lounge.

Perhaps not. The point here is that we all experience lapses in baking-from-scratch capacity, whatever the cause. For those days, it's good to have a backup plan that will allow you to maintain your reputation as an impressive baker with a minimum of work.

Enter the kitchen blowtorch.






S'mores Icebox Pie
Idea adapted very, very loosely from Epicurious (more about that below). You'll need a culinary blowtorch -- I love mine. Serves eight to twelve.

INGREDIENTS

a prepared 9-inch graham cracker pie crust
a 5-6 oz. box (or the equivalent weight in smaller boxes) of your favorite stovetop chocolate pudding mix
whole milk OR half & half (however much the pudding box tells you you'll need)
a bag of marshmallows, regular- or mini-sized (you'll use ~5 oz.)
 
METHOD

Prepare pudding according to directions on box. If you've got some cocoa powder in the house, toss a couple tablespoons in there for bonus flavor. When it's thickened to your liking, immediately pour pudding into pie crust and smooth surface with the back of a large spoon.

Refrigerate -- uncovered if your fridge isn't stinky, or covered loosely with aluminum foil if it is -- for at least 3 hours, until pudding is more firm than wiggly. I don't recommend covering the pie with the crust package lid -- the crust will get soggy around the edges from condensation.

When everyone's just about ready for dessert, prepare your marshmallows. If you have mini marshmallows, this will consist of opening the bag. If you have larger 'mallows, cut them into rough thirds or smaller -- kitchen shears work best for this. Cut up enough to cover the entire surface of the pie in heaps.

Get your pie out of the fridge. (If you covered it, take care -- lots of condensation will have collected on the cover. Once it's off you can dab any droplets from the pie's surface with a paper towel.) Slice the pie.

Working with one slice at a time, plate the pie. Pile marshmallows on top of the slice at hand, completely covering the surface. Set your blowtorch's gas output to low and hold the torch 4+ inches away from the marshmallows. Roast 'em, rotating the plate to get as much caramelization from as many angles as possible. Blow out any lingering flames. Serve.


ADDITIONS, SUBS, AND ALTERNATE IDEAS:

You could probably add a tablespoon of whatever booze you like to the pudding during cooking for extra flavor. Whiskey or something orangey would be nice. And I'd be curious to see whether it'd be possible to use a jar of marshmallow fluff in place of the 'mallows.

Now, if you're having the kind of day where you feel like a superhero of baking, you could just go ahead and make the aforementioned Chocolate S'more Pie from Epicurious. I did that one Thanksgiving and it was fairly spectacular(ly messy):




The marshmallow layer is browned under the broiler -- which the chocolate layer can stand up to 'cause it's a very thick baked custard.


Photos by Maria Melee. At the moment, I was up to my elbows in molten marshmallow.

If you try anything different, let me know how it comes out!

thank you, Mr. Bradbury

There are a handful of authors whose storytelling and use of the English language made me want to be a writer, back when I was a kid. First it was the humor of Louis Sachar, Roald Dahl, and Norton Juster, the atmosphere of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Madeleine L'Engle. Later I would pick up Douglas Adams, Tom Stoppard, and Oscar Wilde; Peter S. Beagle, Grace Paley, and Kurt Vonnegut. But right in the middle, in those formative years when brains and bones ache from growth, was Ray Bradbury.

I lost my first copy (my parents' copy) of The Illustrated Man loaning it out to someone -- which is fine, books are owned the way cats are owned: at their own will. But it looked like this:

The stories in it were creepy and quiet and sad and joyful. Its characters and scenes were alive, as surely as the illustrated man's tattoos, given breath and motion by Bradbury's distillation of the language. I have always interacted with the world best through writing, and the patterns in his words expanded my idea of what writing could be. Reading that book at that age was a paradigm shift.

I based my youth around writing because of shifts like that, and realized in college, somewhere around my eighth writing workshop in four years, that I enjoy editing far more. I'm skiving off gainful freelance editing employment right now to write this post. I do what I do because of writers like Bradbury.

I'm not a fan of everything he ever wrote, and being from the Internet myself, I'm slightly personally offended by some of the cantankerous things he said about computers and digital communication. But the world is a more wondrous place for his having been in it.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.