Winning Eyeballs

I don't love Halloween. I never liked dressing up, I don't like being scared, and all the gross/creepy things on purpose are not my cup of tea. But at work we had a Halloween party, and one part of the festivities was an "ugly food" contest with a promised prize, so I decided to get a little halloween-y and make something a little gruesome looking: eyeballs floating in a pool of blood.

And guess what?!

I won!

Sorry this is too late for y'all to make your own prize-winning eyeballs for Halloween this year, but here it is for next year.

Notes:

If I did it again I would cut the recipe in half. I only made 12 eyeballs and then had tons of the panna cotta left over, which I poured into a bread pan for a mold, sliced and served with more "blood" sauce. It was delicious, but not everyone likes gelatin based desserts, so it was an excessive amount for our relatively small party.

You will need something spherical or semi-spherical-ish for a mold. I used mochi ice cream containers which were (luckily) just the right size and shape to work with the grape "iris", and it was a good excuse to get mochi ice cream from a certain specialty food store. You can also find them at some Asian markets.

I arranged the instructions into very small, very manageable steps; it looks like a lot, but it isn't hard.

Coconut Panna Cotta "Eyeballs" with Raspberry-Cherry "Blood" sauce
2 cans (400mL) coconut milk
2 packets Knox unflavored gelatin (1/2 oz or 14 grams)
1 cup water
1 cup white sugar
12 dried blueberries (more or less, depending on how many eyeballs you want)
6-12 green seedless grapes (more or less, depending on how many eyeballs you want)
fresh or frozen raspberries and/or cherries
a little more white sugar (just a teaspoon or two should do it)
Pomegranate arils (optional)

To make the "eyeballs":

1) Warm coconut milk in a saucepan, stir occasionally, or it will do some crazy splattering. Don't let it come to a boil.

2) Meanwhile, sprinkle gelatin over cold water in a small saucepan, let stand about 1 minute, then start warming this up over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the gelatin is dissolved.

3) By now your coconut milk should be hot, but not boiling. Pour the hot gelatin water into the hot coconut milk, add the 1 cup of sugar and keep stirring over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, it should just take a couple of minutes. Remove from heat and let it start cooling.

While the mixture is cooling, start prepping your eyeball molds and with the other eyeball parts:

4) Make sure your mochi ice cream cups (or whatever you are using for a mold - see note above) are clean and dry.

5) Put the dried blueberries in a small bowl, pour boiling water over, let stand for a couple of minutes to soften.

6) Cut some grapes in half latitudinally, scoop out a small amount of grape insides, just enough to fit a dried blueberry inside.

7) Insert the soaked dried blueberry into the hollow you just made in the grape half, place the grape half cut-side down in the mold. Press down to make the blueberry and grape as flat against the bottom of the mold as possible.

8) Repeat with as many grapes and blueberries you need to fill all the molds you have to make as many eyeballs as you want.

9) Pour the coconut milk-gelatin mixture into the molds over the grapes. Hold the grape halves down with a finger while you pour so they stay centered and flat against the bottom and don't get pushed around.

10) Let the panna cotta finish cooling and setting up in the fridge, it will take a couple of hours. 

To make the "blood":

11) Warm up some raspberries with a little sugar (I used about 1 1/2 cups frozen) with a little sugar until the sugar is dissolved, the raspberries will break apart, but that is just fine.

12) If you want to use cherries also, place them in a blender (I used about 1 cup frozen) pour the warm raspberry mush in the blender over the cherries, blend together until everything is pureed, but not liquified. Add a little water if necessary to keep the blender from getting stuck.

13) Put the raspberry-cherry puree through a sieve to separate the good stuff from the seeds. Store the sauce in the fridge until you are ready to serve with eyeballs.

To assemble the "eyeballs floating in a pool of blood":

14) Unmold the panna cotta cups onto a serving platter. I had to gently pull some of them out with my fingers, they didn't all come right out easily when I flipped over the mold. Arrange them strategically on the platter.

15) Some of the coconut gelatin may have gone underneath the grapes/blueberries so that when you flip them over it is hard to see the "iris" and "pupil," kind of like a cataract (well, more like a pterygium), so you may perform surgery -- very carefully cut some gelatin away from the grapes so that they'll be visible. This can all be done ahead of time.

16) Just before serving, pour the sauce around the eyeballs artistically, and sprinkle the pomegranate arils around also, if desired.

Claim your prize and dig in!

Credit where credit is due: 

Recipe from here, but there are tons of coconut jelly/panna cotta recipes out there that looked amazing. I used this one because it was very basic and simple, just a few ingredients. And it really was delicious.

Coconut and fruit eyeball plus raspberry "blood" idea from here, but it seems like it wouldn't work with kiwi fruit since kiwis have that protein-disolving enzyme, antinidain.

Mochi ice cream mold idea from here.

Using grapes as irides idea from Lovemuffin who answered "grapes" when I asked "what can I use as a spherical jello mold?" (he's so cute.)

Korean Style Vegetable Pancakes

Do you have in your life, or are you one of those difficult people with some kind of dietary restriction? Vegetarian? Gluten free? Lactose intolerant? Here's the recipe for you: meat-free, dairy-free, gluten-free. And tasty and pretty filling. (Not vegan, though, sorry vegans.)

The basis for this recipe is from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian," and I am loving it (I've probably made these 4 times in the last month). I multiplied it the original by 1 1/2 and should have done even more, because if you're going to stand over a stove cooking stacks of pancakes, might as well go big, like when you make crepes, always double or triple the recipe, you know they'll get eaten. 

This would be a good recipe for using up leftover difficult vegetables. You could probably even use one of those bags of prepped coleslaw or broccoli slaw mix. This time around I used shredded carrots, chopped onions, and slightly steamed cabbage. I think putting green onions in it gives it more of the Korean vibe, and I particularly like it with sauteed mushrooms, to give it a little meaty-ness. And it's an easy recipe to adjust, the egg : flour : water ratio is simple (1 : 1 : 3/4) and doesn't require complex math to scale up or down. And these are good the next day, and the next day after that, they just need a little rewarming, so go ahead, scale it up, and turn on a TV show or find a good book to read while you do some serious pancake cooking.

Korean Style Vegetable Pancakes

3 eggs

3 cups rice flour  **see note at bottom 

2 1/4 cups water

salt to taste

pepper to taste

any other spices you like (chili powder, coriander, paprika, basil, garlic, etc) to taste

about 3 cups? ( I didn't measure, oops.) chopped or shredded vegetables (carrot, summer squash, green onion, slightly steamed cabbage, peppers, regular onions, sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, etc)

Whisk together eggs, rice flour, water, salt, pepper, and any spices you want. Add your chopped and shredded vegetables. There should be plenty of vegetable per batter, I wish I'd measured for you. 

Heat up a skillet to medium or medium high heat, lightly oil the skillet and scoop out some vegetable/batter onto the hot skillet. I used about a cup, maybe a little less, of the mixture in my 9" cast iron pan. There should be enough batter-iness to the batter to completely encase the vegetables, but it should still be plenty vegetable-y. I found that I had to quickly move rearrange clumps of vegetables to get them evenly distributed among the batter. 

batter in the pan a couple minutes before flipping

pancake in pan after flipping

Let it cook for a few minutes, the bottom should get getting a little color, and the top will probably be dry, carefully flip it over and let it cook a few minutes more until the top gets a little color on the parts that stick out, then gently scoop it off onto a plate. Repeat with remaining batter. Be sure to flip gently, and don't flip before it's ready, especially if you are doing all rice flour, they will be more delicate than the regular breakfast pancakes you might be used to, because there's no gluten to hold it all together.

Cut into triangles and serve with soy sauce, sriracha, Thai sweet chili sauce (my favorite), or whatever else floats your boat. This size batch made 6 9" pancakes. 

**Mark Bittman says you can use all or part wheat flour, but I like the texture of using all rice flour best, and then you can feed it to your gluten-free friends or self. I get rice flour at the Asian or international grocery store, I think you can also get it at Whole Foods or in the special healthy section of a grocery store if you have a good grocery store.