Gross Halloween Candy and a Swamp Cocktail

When I worked full-time, I always had a candy bowl in my office.  The weird thing about it is I never really ate much of the candy in the bowl.  I can truly resist candy…until it is in a bowl in my house waiting for Halloween.  I’m not sure why I test this theory every year, but I do and the results are always the same.  Candy wrappers are all over my house and the bowl has to be refilled prior to Halloween night.  Sometimes, the bowl even has to be re-filled twice.

When I was growing up, my mom had me so worried about razor blades in our candy that it was barely enjoyable to eat the candy.  Every piece had to be inspected except for those gross candies that came in the red and black wrappers…those we could eat, but who wanted to actually eat those?  Does anyone even remember what those things were called??  Yuck.  That is one throw back from the seventies that I do not want to revisit.  I remember one year, as the candy was being thoroughly inspected by my mom and probably eaten by my dad, I watched an episode of Saturday Night Live.  I remember staring at those horrible orange and black wrapper piece-of-shit candies and then looking up to see Gilda Radner (has there ever been another person named Gilda?) playing a kid getting a story read to her.  John Belushi played her dad.  She was scared of monsters in the closet and a weird creature kept coming out of the closet (not in the gay sense, but in the actually walking out of a closet sense) trying to get her.  She’d scream, the monster would disappear and John Belushi would come in and get mad at her.  It was pretty funny and clearly funny enough that I remember it over 30 years later.

On another note, this is a pretty cool and tasty Halloween cocktail.

Swamp Water Halloween Cocktail

Ingredients

1 ½ oz spiced rum

10-12 fresh mint leaves

1 tbsp brown sugar

½ of lime, juice of

2 oz club soda

Splash of cola

10-15 fresh blueberries

Preparation

In a cocktail glass, combine the brown sugar, lime juice and mint.  Pound together to break up the mint and bring out its flavor.  Fill the glass up about ¾ of the way with crushed ice.  Pour the rum over.  Add club and a splash of cola to give it a swampy color.  Throw in some blueberries and serve.

Cocktail Source