By 
Did you know that the clocks are going back this weekend? They are, but you can thank me later.
If your house is anything like ours, the chat about Halloween has been underway for some time already. The ‘chat’ is two-pronged: What are we going as next Thursday? And, what food are we having at the Halloween party?
Personally, I’m more concerned about next Thursday’s gastronomy than I am about what clothes or make-up I’ll be wearing.
That’s not to say that I never dress up of course. In fact, last year I had a distinct Día de los Muertos vibe – black suit, top hat, skeleton face – come to think of it, I could also have been Baron Samedi from ‘Live and Let Die.’
This year, I thinking of growing a moustache and buying a cowboy hat.
But what about the food?
Well, a new tradition in our house is the creation of scary pizzas. It’s actually a competition to see who can design the scariest pizza with the cunning use of tortilla wraps and lots of multi-coloured ingredients – tomato sauce, mozzarella, salami, sweetcorn, sliced chillies, olives, red and yellow peppers, chicken, bacon and anchovies.
We’ve had pumpkin faces, vampire faces, monster faces, weird faces and faces that look as though they’ve been created by a chimpanzee having a panic attack.
The visual results, let’s say, are usually mixed – but then there’s the other rule: You have to eat whatever scary pizza you create. You might well create something that looks frightening but if it isn’t tasty, you’re the loser.
One thing that I also think works really well when it comes to designing a pizza is edible paint. In this case the edible paint is home-made barbecue sauce and I put it into a squeeze-y bottle for ease of design. It helps accentuate certain freaky idiosyncrasies like eyes and mouths and even hair and also, it being top quality barbecue sauce, always tastes deadly – deadly being the operative word.
In terms of making this sauce, which we shall forevermore refer to as Deadly Sauce, you might even have most of the ingredients in the house already. The only thing I had to buy was treacle.
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsps of malt vinegar
60ml of apple cider vinegar
250ml of red sauce
1 tbsp of treacle
50ml of hot sauce (leave this out if you want a milder version)
2 and a half tbsps of soy sauce
2 tbsps of brown sugar
1 tbsp of honey
2 tsp of onion powder
1 tsp of garlic powder
1 tsp of mustard powder
Half a tsp of black pepper
Dash of water
THE PLAN
This will take less than five minutes.
In a saucepan or frying pan on a medium heat, add in the malt and apple cider vinegars.
When they’re bubbling add in the honey, brown sugar and red sauce. Mixie, mixie, mixie and then add in the treacle, soy, onion and garlic powders, mustard and black pepper.
Stir some more until everything is combined and smooth and that’s pretty much it.
If it’s a little thick, you can add that dash of water to thin it out a little. To be honest, it’ll thicken a little as it cools so it’s better to have it a little thin before you decant it into your bottle of choice.
Other than your scary pizzas, this is jackpot stuff on burgers and ribs and as of last week, I also discovered that it works well on beans on toast. However it really shines on pulled pork sliders.
And remember, Deadly Sauce isn’t just for Halloween.
