As you know, I'm trying desperately to make the family vegetarian and I am TOTALLY failing.
But here is my recipe for Halloween pizza. Halloween is a frantic night for us because we get about 800 – 1,000 trick-or-treaters. So, I tend to make things that are fast and easy like calzone snakes or mummy Stromboli, but this… this, my friends, is the ultimate in easy. It's sort of embarrassingly easy. Stay tuned below for the story of my first-ever ghost sighting.
So, sometimes I cheat because on Halloween things get hectic here.
Realize that you have no time to make food that isn't candy.
Spray bottom of a 16-by-11-inch rimmed baking sheet with the stuff that makes things not stick. Or use olive oil, but olive oil is expensive, so maybe don't. I mean olive oil is awesome, but we're already using pre-made pizza dough here so pretension is gone, right?
Stretch that dough evenly to cover bottom of sheet.
This is a lot like stretching your 20,000-word story into a 50,000-word novel. You might have to take a couple of rounds, and rest in between to get this stretched.
Open the jar of sauce.
Cry because you have no wrist strength.
Celebrate when you finally open the jar. Celebrate by eating candy.
Spread that sauce over the dough. Try to make it even. Leave a border on all sides of the rectangle. Try to make that border a 1-inch border.
Set a timer. Put it in the oven.
Celebrate that. Celebrate that with candy.
Now, you get to have fun! Yay, fun! Remember fun?
Scrounge up a ghost-shaped cookie cutter and cut ghosts out of cheese.
Put the ghosts on the pizza. It is hot. Be careful. Obviously these ghosts have been hanging out in hell. The sauce is like red flames. And the whole scene is hot.
Celebrate liberating the ghosts from hell with candy.
Hide the candy wrappers in the garbage during the final five minutes of baking.
Take the pizza out. Look how cool that is!
Put caper eyes on each ghost.
Let is stand for five minutes. Eat it. Eat it with a celebratory side dish of candy.
Man Verdict: It needs meat and more cheese.
My Verdict: Seriously? I'm so full from the candy.
Dogs' Verdict: We agree with the man. If you're going to dress us up, the least you can do is add more meat.
This is the story about the first ghost that I ever saw. . . Or the first possible-ghost I ever saw for you nonbelievers.
I grew up in what used to be rural Bedford, New Hampshire and I lived up on a hill on the corner of Hardy Road and Route 101, which was then a little two-lane highway that led from Manchester, New Hampshire (a thriving metropolis former mill town) to points west. People thought my house, a dark brown ranch with red shutters, perched up on the hill was creepy. It was the kind of house people would dare each other to go to. On a positive note, we didn't get a ton of door-to-door solicitations.
My house was scary, but my house was also home, which is sort of this weird concept for some people, a dichotomy that doesn't make a ton of sense. How can your home be scary but also comforting? They have created entire entertainment enterprises out of this concept – things like the Addams Family where the macabre is comforting. Or the vampire family in Twilight where their vampyric nature is hidden by the clean, modern lines of wealth and big windows and good hair.
You can only hear so many footsteps in so many houses before people start to think that you're either lying or a freak. I spent a lot of time trying to quash the differences inside of me – of being poor, of slurring my s's, of being the freak with the haunted house, the person who sometimes knew things she shouldn't logically know.
So, yeah, I grew up in this house my dad built in Bedford, NH. It was on a hill. There'd been another house there about 100 years before but it had burned down. And after that some people from Connecticut built a camp in the woods and would come there in the summer. That was in the early 1900s, I think. But those were the only known houses before ours.
Anyway, we had this great big picture window in the living room. My dad and mom were arguing at the kitchen table, so I toddled off and went into the living room. It was night time. I was really little, probably somewhere between three and five, because my parents were still married enough to be living in the same house.
I really hated them fighting so I waddled over to the picture window and decided to blow on it, so I could make those hand footprints in the mist that comes from your breath.
So, I started to blow on the window to see if it would frost up, but then I noticed something outside on our front lawn. Our front lawn was a big, grassy hill that sloped down to the road. I cupped my hands around my eyes so I could see better and peered out because it was getting dark. There was a woman wearing a long, white dress walking across the lawn, from left to right.
That was weird. Nobody ever walked across our lawn at almost night. We were really rural then, up a long, dirt driveway, up a hill.
I was little, but I knew it was funky.
But something else was wrong, too.
She was walking right above the hole for the septic tank. It was a big hole about three feet deep that was covered with two granite slabs. I knew it was there because my mom was always warning me about falling in and breaking an ankle. My mom was really, really worried about my ankles. I grew up thinking pretty much anything could break my ankle — holes, bikes, skis, horses, soccer….
So, anyway, even though there was a hole there, the lady walked right over it.
I yelled for her but they kept arguing. The woman kept walking. She lifted her arm and waved. She seemed nice.
My mom and dad both rushed to the picture window.
"There's nothing," my dad said.
My mom put me to bed, right away, but my parents stopped arguing, at least for that night.
I love this book baby and you can order my middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.
All sorts of different things scare different people. We're breaking from our normal podcast format for Halloween and talking about our scary stories and what makes a story feel scary to us.
"The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.
The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm.
What scares you? Do you agree with King's hierarchy of fear?
Knowing when to hide is an okay life skill.