Here's the main course for your Halloween Dinner Party. It's a
tribute to the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos or the Day of the
Dead. One tradition is to make sugar skulls and decorate them with your
name.
Our Spooky Skulls are turkey meatloaf made
with Mexican spices and placed on a spider web of mole sauce. Turkey
mole is one of the most ancient Mexican dishes. Mole (pronounced
moe-lay) is made with peppers, cocoa, peanuts and other ingredients. It
can be purchased pre-made in jars at Mexican groceries and in the
ethnic food aisle of most grocery stores.
If you have a peanut allergy, skip the salsa in the meatloaf and instead put the salsa around the meatloaf.
{Makes 4 Skulls}
You'll need:
1 pound of ground turkey
1 cup of finely chopped onion
1/2 cup uncooked oatmeal
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon of ground cumin
1/2 cup of salsa - mild or medium
1 tablespoon oregano
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
12 jumbo-sized pitted black olives
Prepared Mole sauce
Cooking spray
Some adult help
Equipment:
A large bowl
Aluminum foil
A cookie sheet
Oven pits and 2 hot pads
A basting brush
Individual serving plates
Several zipper-type sandwich bags
Kitchen shears or scissors
A spatula
Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Line the cookie sheet with the foil and give a light coating of cooking spray.
In the large bowl, mix the meat, onions, oatmeal, garlic, cumin, salsa, egg, and pepper.
Divide the mixture into four lumps. Then take enough meat to make a meatball from one quarter. This is your skull's chin.
Roll the rest of the quarter into a large ball. Position the ball on the foil then pat into a thick hamburger.
Attach the small meat ball and pat into a chin shape, smoothing the chin into the rest of the head.
Using your thumb make two eye holes and a nose hole for the skull.
Bake
for 20 minutes. After about 10 minutes ask your uncle or whoever's
cooking with you to use the basting brush to clear out the liquid in
the eyes and nose.
While the meatloaf is baking, spoon about 5 tablespoons of mole into the zipper bag.
When
the meatloaf it done take it out of the oven.
Cut
two olives in half. One will be the eyes and if cut the bottom off one
half of the other, it will be your nose. Use the rest of the second
olive half to cut into teeth.
Cut a tiny hole in the sandwich bag containing the mole.
Squeeze a little at a time onto your serving plate in a pattern like a spiderweb.
Have your adult helper position the meatloaf in the center of the plate and serve while hot.
Looks ghoulish and tastes great!
