Take a sprinkle of creativity, a dash of pragmatism and stir well to summon a memorable Halloween, free from the burden of excessive packaging and waste.
Save what you don’t use for later, give it away at the end of the night, or failing that, put your home compost to good use.
Enchant your guests on arrival
Bloody beverages and cursed concoctions
Rather than bottles and cans, serve drinks in sharing bowls decorated to fit your theme. Delicious fruity mixtures can be made menacing with blood reds from cranberry or pomegranate juice, or a garish orange with carrot, orange or freshly made pumpkin juice.
Garnish drinks with gummy worms or fruit cut to look like eyeballs or teeth to ramp up the fear factor.
Graze from a ghoulish platter
Lay charcuterie boards or crudité out in the shape of mysterious creatures to help get the conversation flowing.
Strange spellbinding servings
Arachnid arancini
Use food colouring or colourful spices like turmeric to fashion arancini into tasty Halloween favourites like jack-o’-lanterns, spiders or bats.
Paper (or creative use of food like mushrooms) can be turned into wings or legs, alongside salsa to make vampire bats or other gory details.
Squashed monster burgers
Decorate burgers with cheese cut into the shapes of tongues or teeth, and googly mayonnaise eyes atop the bun to create goofy monster burgers. Pulled pork or jackfruit can be used to add ‘gore’, or as spindly arms and legs reaching out of the bun in despair.
Perilous pumpkin soup
Instead of throwing them away, use the innards from carved pumpkins by cooking up a seasonal pumpkin soup. If you haven’t carved them into lanterns, bake and serve the soup inside a hollowed pumpkin for a showstopping starter.
Pernicious pies and pastries
Bake a pie fit to make Sweeney Todd squirm by decorating with pastry ‘fingers’, or dot with ‘escaping’ bugs to suggest something rotten inside. Cut pastry lids into a skeleton or other ghoulish face for the filling to spill out of.
If you’re feeling ambitious, you could even layer pastry strips to create a mummified head for your Halloween table.
Queasy quesadillas
Full of salsa and melted cheese, quesadillas can make good use of seeping liquids for comic grotesquerie. Cut the top tortilla into a carved pumpkin or skull and crossbones for a creepy, crispy treat.
Devilish desserts
Fearful fruity treats
For a healthier Halloween dessert option, peel oranges and top with a small celery slice to look like pumpkins. You could also decorate with wildly drizzled melted chocolate hair, a mouth of strawberries (with red jam oozing out) and blueberries or passionfruit seeds for eyes.
Add little chocolate drop eyes and a chocolate button mouth to peeled bananas to make ghostly ‘boo-nanas’. It’s also possible to carve red apple slices that look like vampire fangs – suspend them in jelly for a dessert with a little ‘bite’.
Macabre marshmallows
Puffed rice marshmallow versions of savoury arancini can be used to make ‘eyeballs’ or dyed to make little pumpkins. Use chocolate for additional decoration, or try building whole bodies from marshmallow rice.
Bilious bakes
Home-baked goodies are the best bet for easy, low-waste desserts that can be decorated to fit any theme. With baking, the only limits are your skill and imagination. Biscuits, cookies, and cupcakes can become a canvas for anything you dare to dream up.
Make a tray of brownies into a grim graveyard, or decorate each brownie with its own chocolate tombstone to look like freshly disturbed earth. Cake pops make shaping and decorating Halloween characters easy and fun, while full-sized cakes can range from zeitgeisty spooky statements to full-on displays of dark revelry.
Ice cream to scream about
Decorate ice cream cones to make pointed witches’ hats or devil horns for simple party pleasers. Use pistachio or strawberry ice cream with brightly coloured sauces and sprinkles to complete the look.
Low-waste treats that avoid the trickery
For trick or treaters, supply sweets wrapped in foil or paper instead of non-recyclable plastic. Buying bulk tubs where necessary reduces overall waste, and you can make up individual pick-and-mix bags of tasty sweets to hand out.
Giving out individually wrapped home-baked goods is guaranteed to make your house a popular stop. Baking and wrapping items yourself also makes it easier to achieve a zero-plastic evening, compared with buying pre-packaged, pre-prepared items.
Palm leaf tableware is understated enough to keep your food centre stage, while complementing the autumnal feel of Halloween. Being 100% compostable, the after-party clean-up will be less of a horror show for you and the environment.
Bamboo and natural wheat straws seamlessly blend into any theme and reduce throwaway plastic waste.
This spooky season, check out FOOGO green’s range of eco-friendly tableware party supplies. We’ve got everything you’ll need to make a monstruous splash, without leaving a Sasquatch-sized footprint.