Good Bye to MoFo but NOT to our Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain..

The Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain is STILL playing Happy Birthday nearly 60 HOURS after it was lit...but in spite of that the theme today was of course Halloween!.
Maybe because we were born in the U.S. where Halloween has always been a bigger holiday and we Trick or Treated our way through the suburbs of Washington DC in the late 60s and early 70s (we were only allowed to go to houses which were decorated and NEVER allowed to go to Miss Mackie's in case she had put razorblades in the sweets(??)..but of course we went anyway and the grapes she gave us were always fine..!) but we always really go to town at Halloween!

Banana! We don't like you!

Wigs, hats, witch and warlock costumes, toffee apples, cinder toffee, scary stories all have to be attended to...stripey tights procured (witches and wizards always wear stripey tights).
Actually stripey tights are our favourite kind anyway and Halloween is a good time to stock up for the rest of the year, especially after Halloween when everyone is selling them off because no-one wants them anymore! Except us!
So we were supposed to be visiting the children's Fairy Godmother today and we were researching Halloweeny recipes for something to make and take with us while we were all retching over our banana breakfast...we had realised we were short of time to get everything done so had decided to forego our beloved toast for breakfast (there are few things nicer in the world than toast and yeast extract for breakfast) and eat a banana each while we cooked.

Bobbing for apples 

The trouble is that none of us like bananas very much (very nice buried in a smoothie..but on their own....) and we all were choking and retching as we battled our dislike of them...those nasty stringy bits up the side..those black stick-y bits at the bottom...the past-y, pappy texture...shudder...but Cinder Toffee won't make itself! 
We galloped our way through making our Halloween essentials(!) (still have to veganise candycorn which we remember fondly from an American childhood) and then realised that because we had utterly failed to work out how to change the time on our oven clock when the clocks went back at the weekend (it has always been 10 minutes out, but is now 1 hr and 10 minutes) we were actually really early!
So we faffed about trying to decide what to wear for an hour and a half until we were late and then set off in a cloud of Lush 'Comforter' perfume (we all love it and anoint ourselves with it liberally on special occasions!) and clutching tins full of cinder toffee..

The children's Fairy Godmother has such a lovely welcoming home and one of the things that I REALLY appreciated today, being a MoFo writer on location(!) was that in order to photograph the beautiful things she'd made I DIDN'T have to spend twenty-five minutes moving clutter out of the way to try and make our kitchen look less...home-educated (an in-joke!)..
Penny had made a Halloween-themed pumpkin and butternut squash stew with roast potatoes, beanburgers and broccoli...it was absolutely amazing, and even though, predictably, Pony needed rescuing from a couple of things, plates were cleared and then dessert arrived on the table!
Apple crumble with apples from Penny's garden and soya yoghurt to eat it with...everything is always so much lovelier at Penny's house that I eat things there that I wouldn't at home - I wouldn't normally ever eat crumble with yoghurt, but it was a lovely combination....Penny once made a crumble for us with plums in and I have to say I don't really think plums ever SHOULD be cooked, but even though I have never knowingly eaten cooked plums again since then, it was lovely when Penny did that...go figure...

Good Bye

After lunch while the children were playing with Lego Penny filled us in on her latest Not-Going-Up-In-A-Hot-Air-Balloon adventure...Penny's brothers bought her a trip up in a hot air balloon as a present for a Significant Birthday and Penny has kept setting it up and it keeps being cancelled by the balloon company because of it being the wrong sort of weather...Penny has been trying to take this trip for 7 YEARS and the only time she came close to it actually happening she was in hospital with pneumonia...which the company demanded proof of so that she didn't forfeit the trip...(WHAT TRIP??!!) Penny's 85 year-old friend, we hope from a long-lived family, is also waiting for HER trip to happen...
We had a very splashy apple-bobbing session - which had prizes all round of vegan chocolate bars (we have very little family and are so lucky to have Penny in our lives) - before we went home and managed to squeeze in, very much against the clock, carving a pumpkin and reading scary stories by pumpkin-light before whizzing the children up to bed and discovering that since we had been navigating by the oven clock again we had got the children to bed and hour and ten minutes early!
So now, I am going to say Good Bye to MoFo and sit down for an hour and ten minutes with Wally Lamb (still reading about Mrs Lizzie Popper..sigh..) and a Frank's Alcoholic Root Beer -  thank you Frank, whoever you are! and thank You for reading - now go and cook something yourself!!