Fun Dishes for a Gastronomical Halloween

It's that official time of the year when the freaky and faulty get to be the "in" things. And while most of us Indians ( I do, okay) sulk over the fact that we never get to celebrate the occasion to its fullest, customary sense like in the other parts of the worlds, I think there's an interesting breakout to not feel that way this year.
So as the title has already clued you in, lets make this Halloween a bit gastronomical. Food is Fun... And its also the other way round. So why not juxtapose your creative streaks, passion for food and the Halloween-loving mind with some fun dishes which are spooky, arresting and yeah the spoilery part- really easy to prepare. To be really honest, there couldn't be a deadlier combo than these spooky preparations and the Halloween night horror movie marathons! So whom are we kidding here! Surprise yourself and the friends you invite in this Halloween with stuffs that are peeking right from your refrigerator..

So here's the first dish from my kitchen.. The recipe is as follows:
Blood-specked Deviled Egg Eyeballs

Ingredients:

• Hard Boiled Eggs: As per servings
• Melted butter
• Grated cheese
• Salt
• fried onion rings ( a little on the burnt side)
• Tomato Ketchup
• Fresh cream

Process:

Boil the eggs and cut each of them into two equal halves. Now carve out the yolk from them.
mix salt, grated cheese, butter with the yolk. (You can add mashed potatoes too). Check if the mixture is smoothed. Now with a spoon fill up the eggs with the yolk. Make onion rings and put it on for garnish so as to resemble a spooky eyeball. Now add a drop of fresh cream to fill the eye hole.  Dip a clean toothpick in ketchup and doodle on the egg white to make them appear as fine lines of bloody tissues on the eye.. And you're done.. Easy huh! Told ya so. :)

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Graveyard themed Chocolate Pancakes

Ingredients:

• Molten dark chocolate
• cocoa powder
• 2 eggs
• Flour
• caster sugar
• Coffee powder
• Oreo biscuits
• onion flowers for garnish
• Butter

Process:

Melt the chocolate on double boiler. Beat eggs with sugar. Ad flour to get the perfect pancake consistency for the batter. Now mix the chocolate, cocoa, coffee and 2-3 cubes of butter.
In a pre-heated pan, make the pancakes..
Now, stack up 4-5 pancakes on a plate. Sprinkle some grated chocolate to give it a mud like impression. Break one of the oreos in two equal halves. Write the word "R.I.P" with chocolate sauce to make it appear as a tombstone. Decorate them as shown in the picture.
Your graveyard themed chocolate pancakes are ready :)

Jack-o-lantern Parantha

Ingredients:

• Flour
• Salt
• Water
• Ghee
• Tomato ketchup

Process:

Duh.. Its' just how you make a basic parantha yo. There's no recipe as such. Just make sure to carve it to give a jack-o-lantern impression. Fry it. Now fill up the holes with ketchup.. :") It's gonna be a sure hit among kids and specimens like me who refuse to grow up!

Stuffed Chicken Bone-shaped Rolls

Ingredients:

• Flour
• boneless chicken pieces or keema
• one mashed potato 
• Chopped onion
• Chopped garlic
• Ginger-garlic paste
• Coriander powder
• Kashmiri red chili powder
• Pepper
• Salt
• Oil

Process: 

(Chicken stuffing)- Boil the chicken and finely chop it. On a pan, heat oil and add the onion, garlic and ginger-garlic paste one by one. Now add the chicken. Saute it. Add the mashed potato. Add salt, pepper, chili and coriander powder. Take it off the heat once the stuffing gets the perfect binding.

(For the rolls)- Make a regular dough and let it rest for a while. Now make small balls out of it like it is done while making puris. Roll it to the size of an average puri. Next add the chicken stuffing. Make sure the stuffing is limited within the center and avoid spreading it to the corners. Now fold it like a pipe. Softly press with hands. Cut an inch at the middle of both the ends of the rolls. Now fold each end to give it a bone like shape. Deep fry and serve it with a lip-smacking garlic-tomato dip.
Try it. It is super fun, innovative and unbelievably simple..

20th Anniversary of Pulp Fiction: A Retrospective

“I wanna dance, I wanna win. I want that trophy, so dance good……”

And saying that aforesaid line, she took the floor. Ah, what a vision this woman was. That dove-white crisp shirt was complimenting her posture without her being aware of that. Like a breeze in its full degree of freedom, she moved her legs to the beats of ‘You Never Can Tell’ by Chuck Berry. She was oozing glamour and panache that pierced right through the viewers’ hearts and babbling a thousand words that broke the ‘awkward silence’ all over. Yeah, I am talking of Marsellus Wallace’s wife, Mia and the famous “Dancing Scene”. Do you realize how much time has passed since you watched her tap her feet for the very first time? Well, that will be exact TWENTY YEARS! That long eh? Well, you know how the saying goes, “Art is timeless”. And a Pulp Fiction-y one definitely is.

20 years seem quite a mark. It’s been 20 years since the silver screens of USA witnessed a never-seen-before Tarantinolized phenomenon that vehemently transformed independent cinema for generations to come and the impact of which hasn't tend to wane an ounce after all these years.

 On October 14, 1994, a crime comedy masterpiece titled “Pulp Fiction” was released in American theaters and subsequently worldwide and the rest is history yet in making. The magnitude of Pulp Fiction can not be constrained within a narrow profit-loss Box-office report. With its release, the movie-goers’ world saw something that does not occasionally make itself known. The avant-garde storytelling and ground-breaking themes and narrative made this film a cult fiction that has instituted its own genre of exceptional filmmaking. After 20 years, I won’t shrink back to state that this epic film will always be one of my most cherished films of all time and I won’t mind a bazillion rewatches to affirm that .

Fanrt Source:

Pulp Fiction was director Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious project which he had developed over a year during his stay in Amsterdam. A modest apartment, a deep-rooted passion, and snippets of ideas- History tells us that this is everything that a writer needs to be unimaginably great or pathetically bust. What became of then 30 year old Tarantino is known to all. So that was how Pulp Fiction was being made, in the form of several pages of notebooks and scraps of handwritten jotted plots. However as things soon fell in place, all the seemingly discrete words and lines were intertwined to present what we today know as Pulp Fiction. When the film was released leading review portals of USA came into an almost unanimous verdict- This film grips you like a power shot of adrenaline and you cannot shrug off the hang that easily.

It seemed the whole American film industry was structurally reinvented by its arrival. Tarantino continued his obsession over distinctive story-telling, disjointed narrative, pop culture references, intense violence, drug cartels, mob gangs and vigorous swearing from his previous directorial “Reservoir Dogs” to “Pulp Fiction”. All the badass Bible quoting, gun blazes, booms, “a Royale with Cheese”, “English Motherfu****” opne-liners have chipped in our minds the countless memories that we easily associate with this classic directorial. This film was outrightly smashing all scales of hitherto accepted medians of filmmaking and we simply loved it that way. Ain’t so!

Pulp Fiction not only made loads of green and also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that very year. It kickstarted the career graph for lead actors John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman and Tarantino was nothing short of a visionary among the bandwagon of young directors.

 Fanrt Source: 

Honestly, a single post or a couple of follow-ups will never be sufficient to cover the true genius of this film. At its 20^th glorious Anniversary all I can do is be absolutely shut up in sheer admiration of it. Not every film gets to be a household name throughout the globe and gets quoted every once in a while. After all these years, its relevance has not rusted an inch. If this is too much of a nostalgia alert for you, then just have a rewatch already. I know I am having one.