Worms For Halloween Dinner

Plate-o-Worms

So yesterday for Halloween dinner we made mini mummy pizzas (little mummy heads with pepperoni, olives for the eyes, and all swathed in mozzarella string cheese bandages on English muffin halves, but the best part was making and eating the Jell-O "blood worms". After seeing this on TV last week, we had to make it. They were just too gross to resist. Take a 6 ounce box of raspberry Jell-O and a box of bendy straws and presto! You have a pile of slimy, surprisingly realistic looking, completely edible nightcrawlers. Even though they taste just like raspberry Jell-O, our youngest had a hard time stomaching the idea.  I, as you can see, had no problem with them.

Mmm-Yummy!

Maybe because I like Halloween but also because of all the years as a kid when we would catch nightcrawlers and sell to fishermen. My grandmother's lawn was watered by flood irrigation and on those nights we would grab the flashlights and go down after dark to match withs with the earthworms. Stealth was the word of the day or you ended up with a handful of grass and mud. I got pretty adept at snagging those things before they could slink back into the ground. Some nights we would catch as many as 100 dozen of the mucous covered Oligochaetae. Our buckets of slippery critters then went in a below ground screen bottomed box full of peat moss where they would live happily munching on cornmeal until they were sold to fishermen.It was a tough way to make a few bucks, but we always knew where the worms were when we wanted to go fishing.

Recipe for Jell-O Blood Worms