Slow Cooking With Fall Flavors: The Halloween Crockpot

About author / Pamela Chester

Mom of two; graduate French Culinary Institute; kids cooking program instructor; Master's degree in food studies. Creates kid friendly foods and loves her slow cooker.

With Halloween just around the corner, it's time to start thinking about candy, costumes, and cooking! Halloween is the perfect holiday to rev up your culinary creativity and there is a multitude of ideas for making colorful, delicious, and sometimes frightening treats centered on a Halloween theme. I have many fond memories of making Halloween themed cupcakes and sweet treats. But I also remember experiencing otherworldly frights based on pretzels shaped like fingers complete with an almond fingernail, peeled grape eyeballs, and cold spaghetti brains.

But if you are looking for treats that are more on the savory side rather than the spooky, the slow cooker is a very good place to start. First off, are three great orange colored vegetables that are in season at this time of year— pumpkins, butternut squash and sweet potatoes. These three vegetables are super nutritious— packed with vitamins, especially vitamin A, and fiber— and will complement many a slow cooked dish. Not only that, they will add a dash of fun color to make a Halloween themed meal complete.

Next time you are making a beef stew, you can cut any of these veggies into cubes and add them to the slow cooker along with your other ingredients for a delicious and good-for-you twist. Another great idea is to make a puree by cooking them (peeled and cubed) slowly for 6 to 8 hours in a low crockpot with chicken stock or water to cover. Once the sweet potatoes or squash are cooked through, you can use a hand blender to blend into a flavorful puree that matches well with the hearty dishes of fall.

On Halloween, dinner at my house growing up was always a hurried affair, consisting of the rare treat of a frozen boxed dinner such as Banquet fried chicken and French fries, so we could move on to trick-or-treating before it got too late (it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what we had for dessert!). But now that most trick-or-treating takes place during the day or on a weekend afternoon you can use your crockpot to make a tasty and nutritious bubbling pumpkin stew.

While pumpkin is mostly known as a pie filling, there is a place for it in savory side dishes, main courses, and soups. For the Curried Pumpkin soup below, you could substitute squash or sweet potatoes for the pumpkin (cook first and puree) or any combination of the three. You can garnish the soup with toasted pumpkin seeds that you have saved and roasted after a session of carving jack o’ lanterns. If you really want to go all out you can complete the pumpkin theme with bowls fitting to the season by hollowing out and roasting small sugar pumpkins and then filling them with the soup or stew. Once you are finished with the soup, you can enjoy the naturally sweet and rich flesh of the pumpkin that remains.

In addition, you can use the crockpot as a bubbling cauldron from which to serve various Halloween punches (there are some pretty ghoulish ones out there) like the Witches Brew Hot Cider below. One sip of this cider will prove that Halloween is not just for kids!

Serves/Makes: 10

• 1/2 pound bacon, diced
• 2 pounds canned pumpkin puree
• 1 large potato, peeled and diced
• 4 tomatoes, seeded and quartered or diced
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons chicken bouillon granules
• black pepper, to taste
• 5 cups water
• 1 1/2 teaspoon curry powder
• 1 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup heavy cream

Serves/Makes: 1 gallon

• 12 whole cloves
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 2 whole nutmeg
• 2 chunks crystallized ginger
• 1 gallon apple cider