Halloween Dinner and the Time I Put my Pants on Backwards

Tonight was our weekly family dinner night, and it was my turn to cook. Not coincidentally, it is also the Wednesday before Halloween, which means that I got to do a fun Halloween themed dinner!

I was really hoping to take a lot of pictures of all the excellent food that I made, however, as usual, I got distracted by the cooking and eating and forgot to take pictures as I went. So... these are what you get:

After we had finished eating... aside from Chad, who is obviously finishing his cupcake.



The candles and orange lights. Again... after dinner.

On the menu tonight was cheese dip with chips, pumpkin/potatoe soup, stuffed porkchops, and mashed potatoes. The potatoes were full of different cheeses, which I was hoping would be enough to make the lack of gravy a non-issue. However, the cheese didn't give the potatoes enough flavor, so the gravy was missed. The potatoe soup was only partly successful also, since it was very thick and somewhat rich. The porkchops were good, as was the cheese dip (how can you go wrong with 3 kinds of cheese melted together with garlic and chives?!)

But the big hit? That, my friends, was the dessert. I have learned a thing or two from Sandra Lee, and I did a semi-homemade dessert. It was an ice cream treat that was basically homemade pumpkin ice cream (vanilla ice cream with pumpkin and spices) mixed with chopped pecans, and layered with gingersnaps. SO GOOD. I paired it with pumpkin spice cupcakes (spice cake mix with pumkin puree), and here you have our dessert of the evening:

Since Chad is a mason and works with squeeze bags and mortar all day, I let him do the icing with the pastry bag.

After dinner was game time, and we played a game called Doodle Dice. Basically there are dice that have different doodle components on each side (6 dice) and 6 different colored cards, each card having a design on it that has to be made with the doodle dice you roll. The colors correspond with how hard the design is (from orange only needing 1 specific doodle component, to purple needing 6 specific doodle components to make the design up). During the game, I got up to go pee.

At which point I realized that my pants had been on backwards from the time i got home from work at 4:45.

FAIL.