Week 44 - Horror Movie Inspired

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a dish for the Week 44 challenge. The theme was horror movie inspired, which on its face doesn't sound any harder than other inspiration weeks like TV show inspired. But I don't watch horror movies and it's pretty hard to be inspired by something you don't know much about. I looked through tons of sites but nothing clicked (other than things I've already made in other challenges this year). Eventually I just decided to forget trying to find inspiration from a particular movie and to instead make mini mummy pizzas like the ones I had found on the Whole Foods site because they're Halloween themed and there must be mummies in some horror movies, even if I haven't watched them. So here are my horror movie mummy pizzas.

Ingredients for mini pizzas

I decided to do 3 English muffins for the pizzas, giving us 3 mini pizzas each, and then make the rest of the bag of kale (since the kale used for the pizzas barely made a dent in the bag) as a side dish. For the pizzas, I used:

- 3 English muffins, cut in half ($0.85)

- pizza sauce ($0.60)

- 1 red pepper, finely chopped ($0.59)

- a few handfuls of kale, finely chopped ($0.20)

- 1.5 pieces of string cheese ($0.45)

- 12 sliced black olives ($0.20)

The pizzas cost about $2.89. For the rest of the kale, I used an onion, a few cloves of garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, so the total for the kale was about $2.89 as well (what are the chances of that happening?), making the total for dinner a very reasonable $5.78.

These look like Christmas to me

Making the mini pizzas was pretty simple. Once the oven hit 400 degrees, I lined a baking sheet with parchment paper and put the cut muffin halves in the oven for about 5-10 minutes to get them a little crispy. After taking them out and letting them cool for a couple of minutes, I added a layer of pizza sauce and the chopped up kale and peppers. 

Mummy pizzas ready to bake

Next was the string cheese to look like "bandages" and the olives for mummy eyes. Then they went back in the oven for 15 minutes for the cheese to melt. Making pizza is pretty easy, which is probably why we do it so often, and these were super healthy with all the kale and peppers on top. (We had extra kale and pepper toppings so we just ate them raw as a "salad" while we waited for everything to cook.)

Looking slightly less mummy-ish but done

The mini pizzas were okay. They were (very) healthy and tasted fine, but they were more cute and amusing to us than anything else with their olive eyes. They reminded us of mummies with googly eyes and that made us laugh. These were certainly festive enough for our Halloween dinner and they worked for a difficult challenge!