The Veggie
Dress up your cabbage as chicken Parm, or your tofu as zippy lemon-pepper wings.
I have, historically, been a bit of a Halloween hater. Buying an ill-fitting, ready-made costume to wear once always struck me as wasteful, but D.I.Y.-ing something I could be proud of required foresight and patience I simply do not possess. Under the pressure to come up with a topical, maybe scary and definitely silly costume, I’d crack.
This year has been different. For months, as I’ve watched a friend put thought, effort and creativity into an original costume, I could feel inspiration and whimsy replace the holiday cynicism coursing through my body. In the course of a Saturday afternoon, I bargain-shopped and epoxy-glued my way into a costume.
No matter where you fall on the spooky spectrum, there are ways to invoke the spirit of Halloween in your kitchen. I won’t ask you to dress up. I will ask you to dress up your vegetables.
Hear me out. Cauliflower dressed up as the classic Chinese American dish sweet and sour chicken, à la Hetty Lui McKinnon? Or cabbage dressed up as chicken Parm, another creative swap from Hetty? Costume-contest winners, if I do say so myself.
Ali Slagle’s lemon-pepper tofu and snap peas (above) especially caught my ATLien eye. She didn’t exactly set out to put tofu in a lemon-pepper wing costume, but the combination of piquant black pepper and zippy lemon evokes the flavors of the game-day classic.
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