A Wicked Fun Dinner

I had my son and his gf over for a Halloween dinner tonight and we had A BLAST!!! On our menu was:

Jack-o-lantern Sandwiches
Black Bean and Spider Web Soup
Ghos-tados
Missing Bloody Fingers (Fries w/ketchup)
Pumpkin Roll Cake

I was planning on a soup and sandwich dinner and thinking about cutting the bread into pumpkin shapes, then I remembered I had this vintage sandwich maker called a Toastite. It makes round hot sandwiches you cook on the stovetop. This is a Toastite.

So here's what we did. We took our bread and painted on jack-o-lantern faces using food coloring and water. Mine is the plain ugly one.


I'm sure the last time I used the Toastite we made ham and cheese sandwiches, but tonight we had dried tofu (my new fave tofu from the asian market), sauted onions and peppers, and barbecue sauce.


Then you just close up the sandwich in the Toastite and set it over the flame.


You can take a peek after a couple of minutes to see how brown they are getting.


In the meantime, we ladeled out our soup and used tofu sour cream to pipe on the spider webs. My bread face was ugly, but I did have the best web!


I found some corn tortillas in the freezer yesterday and decided to cut them into ghost shapes and bake them. They are topped with chili powder, maple sugar, and a little salt. Ghos-tados.


Here is Chase's dinner. He gets credit for most of the photography tonight. Poor child never gets a hot meal anymore!

I think he may have discovered a way to get kids to try tofu. He dipped his in the food coloring!

The sandwiches were so good. I think another good filling would be something with a chickpea gravy. There's limitless possibilities.

BLOGGER WON'T LET ME ADD LINE BREAKS TO THE REST OF THIS POST. SORRY IT LOOKS ALL JUMBLED.

After we all talked about how full we were and couldn't eat another bite, I brought out the cake. It's a pumpkin cake with chocolate filling. It was moist and chocolately and somehow we all made room for a couple of pieces.

After I baked the cake this morning, I couldn't leave half a can of pumpkin hanging out in the refrigerator, so I baked pumpkin raisin mini muffins. I used Dreena's pumpkin raisin bread recipe from The Everyday Vegan.

Here are the soup and cake recipes.

This soup has a lot of flavor layers in it, intensified at the end with a little cocoa powder.

Black Bean Soup:
1 pound dried black beans

1 medium onion, chopped

2 carrots, sliced thin

2 bell peppers

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 bay leaf

2 teaspoons Spicy Montreal Seasoning

1 tablespoon cumin

2 teaspoons oregano

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon Bragg's

1 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

1 teaspoon sea salt

1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

2 teaspoons cocoa powder

Soak the beans (overnight or quick method), then rinse and put in a large soup pot with the onion. Add 9 cups of water. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for an hour.

Add the remaining ingredients, except the cocoa powder, and cook for another 1 to 1-1/2 hours.

Remove the bay leaf. Use an immersion blender and puree about half the beans (or more if you prefer). Add the cocoa powder, adjust seasonings, and add water, if necessary. (I added almost a cup of water at this point, and again when I reheated it.) Cook another 15 minutes.

Pumpkin Roll Cake with Chocolate Filling:

3/4 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1 teaspoon allspice

1 cup pumpkin puree

equivalent of 3 eggs

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease and flour a 10 x 15 baking sheet.

In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, and spices. Add in the pumpkin puree, egg replacer, and lemon juice, and mix well. Spread the batter evenly into the pan and bake for 10 to 12 minutes.

Place a damp kitchen towel on a flat surface and sprinkle it liberally with powdered sugar. Turn the cake onto the towel. Beginning with the short side, roll the cake up with the towel. Place on a cooling rack for 20 minutes.

Prepare filling:

1 box silken firm tofu

1/3 cup brown rice syrup

1 tablespoon vanilla

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1 tablespoon canola oil

dash salt

Place all filling ingredients in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.

When the cake has cooled, unroll it and spread the filling on it. (You will have some left over. Refrigerate it and have pudding later!) Immediately re-roll, without the towel, and wrap it in plastic wrap. Place it seam side down on a platter and refrigerate until ready to serve.

The cake is super moist and would also be great with something other than a chocolate filling. I'm sure it would be much prettier with a white filling, but I was going for an orange and black Halloween look.

We had so much fun preparing this dinner and eating too much!

P.S. to Michelle who asked for my tortilla soup recipe. I don't post recipes unless they are original (copyright issues!). Otherwise, I just let you know where you can find them. That recipe was from Real Food Daily.