Acorn Hall: Ground Turkey Stuffed Acorn Squash

Wow, so, it has obviously been awhile since the last time I posted a recipe on here.  A lot has been going on!  Stoney and I moved from middle-of-nowhere TN to the "big city" (Nashville), ran around in the Hyena costumes at DragonCon, and have just generally been crazy busy.  

One of the biggest perks about moving to Nashville has been the local Farmer's Market.  The theme of this week's market?  Squash!  We found some amazingly beautiful Acorn Squash and also found some wonderful spices at the international market inside of the Farmer's Market pavilion, so we decided on stuffed squash this week.  

The recipe is 4 servings, and your squashes will be completely overflowing with deliciousness!  It pairs wonderfully with a pumpkin beer.

What you need:

• 2 medium acorn squash
• 1 tbsp ghee (or butter, we found ghee at the international market and decided to give it a try)
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1 large jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely chopped
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 1 large celery stalk, chopped
• 2lbs 99% lean ground turkey
• 1 tsp Hawaiian Red Clay salt
• 1 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/4 cup tahini 
• 1/4 cup water
• 3 cups baby spinach leaves
• 2 tbsp sliced almonds, finely ground

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Cut your squash in half and scoop out the guts and seeds.  Spray the flesh with olive oil and sprinkle with Hawaiian red clay salt and pepper.  

Spray a baking sheet with oil, as well, and place the squash flesh-side down.  Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until the squash is soft and the flesh is ever-so-slightly browned.

While the squash is cooking, heat the ghee in a skillet over medium heat, and then sauté the onion, peppers, garlic, and celery for about 3 minutes.  

Next, add in your spices and ground turkey, cooking until the turkey is cooked-through.  

  

Add the tahini, water, and spinach leaves next, cooking until the spinach has wilted.  Remove from heat.

Once you have baked the acorn squash (don't turn the oven off!), let it cool and then scoop out most of the flesh (but you are stuffing them, so remember to leave enough flesh in the squash) and stir it into your stuffing mix.  Leave the hollowed-out squash on the baking sheet.

Now stuff your squash!  Realistically, they will be overflowing, but fret not!  More to eat later!  Now bake everything for 10 minutes, and then turn the broiler onto them for 2.

Faceless Men: Banzai and Shenzi Completed Costumes

Banzai: "Hey did we order this dinner to go?”

Shenzi: “No, why?”

Banzai: “'Cause there is goes!"  

The Lion King

We did it!  We finally completed the hyenas, and with plenty of time to spare before DragonCon!  The costumes ended up being a hit, and we somehow managed to win Best in Show in the Hallway Costume Contest out of over 300 entries.  We were thrilled!  I honesty figured we'd have no chance when we saw the number of wonderful entries, so we were floored when they announced the results at the Masquerade!

Walking in the Parade... It was miserable... .9 miles of hell.
But all of the kids yelling "Mufasa!" and the general great
reception made it 100% worth it.

Here are links to all of the tutorials we made during the construction.

1. Hind Feet
2. Masks
3. Ears
4. Front Legs
5. Neck and mounting the head

There was no tutorial for the body since we just got gray onesies, painted them, and added a tail.

It's been quite a process, but we met a lot of wonderful people at DragonCon who gave us great advice for future projects, and we are chomping at the bit for the Smooth-On projects to arrive in the mail so we can start next year's project...

If you want to stay up-to date on next years project follow us on facebook at Phenix Cosplay,

Just a hint, but the costumes next year will have to do with Fallout.

Rob Stark: Head and Neck Mounting Tutorial

When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world. 

 Timon, The Lion King

This was by-far the part of the costume I was most worried about.  I had quite a few amorphous ideas about how the head would be mounted and the neck would be formed, but for quite awhile, I had no real idea of how any of it would come together.  Luckily, it did come together, and it ended up looking pretty darn cool!  We sacrificed quite a bit of visibility doing it the way we did, but we ultimately decided that we wanted to fabric all the way down to the mask from our heads.  The original Broadway costume was totally open from the head to the mask, like so:

It looks awesome, and I am pretty sure it was done that way to allow the actors to really be able to see where they were going on stage, but the way we figured, we didn't need our visibility to be quite as good, and if we were in a situation that required full range of vision, we could just un-velcro the fabric and let it hang down.  The fabric we used is surprisingly see-though, and the color ended up being pretty close to what we had done the masks and body-suits in.   We did end up cutting small eye-slits into the fabric, but I don't think they were too noticeable.

To wearable parts of our head mounts were a GoPro chest harness and a GoPro head strap.  We then took the leftover crutch bars (the tops, which were cut off to make the hand stilts) and used Thermo-Loc (an extremely hard thermal plastic that comes in little sticks, just microwave on a silicone sheet for a few seconds and its malleable.  Available at http://www.thermo-loc.com/), just to attach the crutch to the clip that goes into the chest mount.  To really make sure the crutch was secured, we wrapped the crutch in duct tape.  Before you lock the crutch bar onto the clip, though, you will want to go ahead and drill a hole on the other end.  This hole will let you attach the bar to the head eventually.

Make sure the bar is attached at an angle so that
the head is positioned properly when bent over

On the base of the masks we used the sticks of thermo-loc to make a little loop that stuck out from the bottom of the mask like so:

We added hot glue to secure
then tape over everything, just to to be safe

This hole and the hole in drilled in the aforementioned metal bar are used to attach the head to the chest mount in a way that allows it to move (with the added benefit of making it easier to put on since the head is removable).  This was accomplished with a cheap trip to the hardware store.  Using a hitch style cotter pin, a clevis pin, and a washer.

How the cotter pin, clevis pin and washer look
when put threw the mounting bar

Now that the heads are mounted on a movable platform it was necessary to get them to move in sync with our heads.  That was actually way easier then it sounds.  We took the Go Pro head mounts that came free with the chest mounts we bought and tied a piece of twine to each side of the mount.  Then glued the other end of the twine to both sides of the top of the heads.

Takes some experimentation to get the
length of twine right.

At this point the heads are wearable.

As soon as we got the heads mounted like this we realized the chest mounts for the go pro where never meant for that kind of weight and are not comfortable so we ended up adding some foam padding we had left over from the feet to the underside of the chest mounts.

The next goal was to attach the necks to cover up our faces.  We did this by using a near see-through women's blouse, with everything above the lowest point of the sleeves cut off.  We hot glued the edge of the shirt to the back edge of the heads and used velcro patches to attach to the body suit.  Don't forget to cut eye holes.  Once we had the top of the blouse attached at the top we put it on and pinned up the bottom so that we could cut off and sew up the excess to make the necks flat.

pinned up bottom before it was cut off.
Pay attention to the exposed bar and mount.
We left this open intentionally so we could see
where we where walking.  since we where low to the ground
others could not see this opening

Don't forget to add hair onto the top of the neck.

FIN!