ASK PAT: “Gruesome” treats for Halloween

In honor of Halloween on Saturday, today’s column features two gruesome recipes: Finger Food (string cheese made to look like real fingers) and Strained Eyeballs (made out of hard-boiled eggs).
The kids will love these and they are a healthy balance to all the candy. Have a safe holiday.

Finger Food

Mozzarella string cheese
Green bell pepper
Cream

Wearing plastic gloves to keep the cheese as clean as possible, use a paring knife to cut each string cheese in half. Then carve a shallow area for a fingernail just below the rounded end of each half. Mark a joint right below the nail as well as back near the other end by carving out tiny horizontal wedges of cheese to look like the wrinkles around finger joints. For the fingernails, slice a green bell pepper into 3/8th-inch-wide strips. With the skin side down trim the pulp so that it’s about half as thick. Cut the strips into ragged-topped nail shapes and stick them in place at the ends of the fingers in the carved out areas with a small dab of cream cheese.

Source: Family Fun

Strained Eyeballs

6 hard-boiled eggs
6 oz. Whipped cream cheese
7 oz. Green olives stuffed with pimientos
Red food coloring

Peel eggs and cut in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks and save for another recipe. Fill the holes with balls of cream cheese. Press an olive into each cream cheese eyeball, pimiento facing up, for an eerie green iris and startling red pupil. For a final touch, dip the tip of a toothpick in red food coloring and draw broken blood vessels in the cream cheese radiating out from the irises.

Source: FamilyCorner.com (Internet)