Post-Halloween Exhaustion Syndrome November 1, 2008

(Warning: this post has absolutely nothing to do with gardening!)

I don’t know when it was that Halloween began to take over my life. Last week? The week before? Trips to the fabric shop (ballerina costume makings), hardware store (lights), drugstore (candy), pumpkin patch (duh), and grandparents’ house (more pumpkins along with the cider pressings) seemed to dominate every day. Decorating the house and yard, even on our fairly modest scale, was a daily project with my daughter. She just kept wanting it to look spookier! Now it’s over but for the candy whining.

One thing that took up a lot of time yesterday was my idea to make “Scary Sushi” for the kindergarten class Halloween party. Weirdly, I couldn’t find any recipes on the Web (just lots of pictures of folks in sushi costumes, which were cute but not particularly helpful), so I just had to make it up. It was my first time making sushi, but I had bought a wooden rice bowl set a while ago at Seattle’s wonderful Asian foods store, Uwajimaya, so I finally got to use it. I didn’t notice until yesterday when I unwrapped it that it is enhanced by imitation copper (i.e. plastic) bands around the bowl. Nice. Here it is, with the sushi rice and the package of pre-toasted nori seaweed:

I used an easy recipe from the Manga Cookbook, which is a pretty hilarious way to learn about Japanese cooking, especially if you have kids or at least a cute-food fetish.

Since I didn’t have a recipe for the fillings, I just tried to think of what five-year-olds might eat (Seattle kids can be pretty sophisticated with stuff like sushi – my kid won’t eat any vegetables except broccoli but she downs seaweed-wrapped sushi rolls by the pound, go figure) and what might at least look a little Halloween-ish. Here are the fillings I came up with: “Mooshy Mushroom,” “Creepy Carrot,” “Crazy Cucumber,” “Awful Avocado,” and “Terrifying Tofu” (I ended up leaving out the cream cheese in case there were any vegans lurking about, and also snuck in some daikon radish without telling them):

Roll in progress, I think I used too much rice but it was sticky and hard to spread:

I made five big rolls and one baby one before I ran out of nori. The rest of the fillings will have to go in a salad tonight or something.

My knives are horribly dull and I was worried I’d end up with just a squishy mess instead of nicely shaped rolls, so I refrigerated the uncut “logs” for a while, not sure if that was kosher but it seemed to do the trick. I cut them up later, decorated them with black sesame seed “bugs” and cut radish “eyeballs” and they were ready to go.

It was a little bit time-consuming but totally fun and actually pretty easy. Next time, I’m getting more bamboo roll mats and will recruit the rest of the family to help out.

Hope you all had a safe and fun Halloween. Did you do any unusual kitchen or garden projects to celebrate?

Spooky Plants October 30, 2008

In honor of Halloween, I offer you a few of the spookier members of the plant kingdom:

Eyeball plant (Spilanthes oleracea)

Native to Brazil, this odd-looking South American medicinal plant (also known as ‘Toothache Plant’) can be grown as an annual or tender perennial elsewhere. Its flowers look like scary bloody red and yellow eyeballs, and ingesting the leaves can cause your tongue to go numb. All in all, the perfect Halloween plant!

Eyeball Plant photo courtesy of Univ. of Wisconsin

Corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum)

I missed the stinky blooming of the University of Washington’s specimen, nicknamed “Waldo,” by about two days this year. Just the flower itself was impressive (and kinda disgusting), but people line up inside the greenhouse for a chance to inhale the distinctive stench that gives this Sumatra, Indonesia native its common name. Somehow, I’m not really that sad to have missed it.

Strangler fig (Ficus aurea)

This native to the Florida Keys and the West Indies is a parasitic plant, beginning its growth when seeds lodge in the bark of its host. It then puts out air roots and lives off nutrients from the host and air. Eventually the roots reach the ground and develop there as well. Also known as the ‘Golden fig,’ if left to its own devices it will often kill off its host. What a bad guest!

Strangler Fig photo by rayb777, Flickr Creative Commons License

Bloodwort (Rumex sanguineus)

Also known as ‘Bloody dock’ for its red-veined leaves, this plant is usually tap-rooted and hard to eradicate once planted. Semi-poisonous if ingested and causes skin irritation if touched. Scared yet?

Bloodwort photo courtesy of Bluestone Perennials

Ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora)

Also known as ‘Indian Pipe,’ this member of the blueberry family lacks chlorophyll and therefore thrives in very dark forest conditions. I would love to come upon these growing in the wild sometime, maybe just not at night. For a fascinating look at how this plant gets its energy, click here.

Ghost Plant/Indian Pipe photo by nordique, via Creative Commons

Witch hazel

Scary name, great plant. Mine is all done with its foliage show for the year, but I still have the winter blossoms to look forward to. I’m not including a picture here because I plan to do a post about it later this week. 🙂

Wolf’s bane (Aconitum lyoctonum)

This relative of Monkshood is a perennial native to northern Europe (hm, wonder if it’s found in Transylvania?) bearing yellow or purple flowers in mid- to late summer. All parts of the plant are extremely toxic if ingested, and even the leaves can cause skin irritation if touched. This one is not going in my garden, for sure.

And lastly, I would just like to add, even though its name doesn’t sound at all scary, the howlingly horrible annual weed and #1 scourge of my garden…

Morning glory (bindweed)

I made the very bad mistake of reading Scott Smith’s horror novel, “The Ruins,” and the carnivorous vines in that book come to mind every time I see the twisting strands of this weed attempting to throttle my other plants to death. It really does seem to grow tangibly larger overnight. I just hope it never comes indoors to try and get me as I sleep! There is an actual parasitic “vampire” plant called dodder vine. This link has photos of it “sniffing out” its prey and going to strangle it. Ewwwww!

What are your favorite scary plants, in name, looks or habit?