Crazy Halloween Names

By Chris Mittelstaedt
October 31, 2010
Reading Time: 2 mins.

I hope you had a scary and spooky Halloween week, the kind that would make proud the scarf-wearing kids from Scooby-Doo. Mine was terrifying, and it started like this: I came home from work and asked my nine-year-old daughter how her day had been. Usually, I get a “fine,” or “the same,” but this day I got a whopper. “We tried to come up with the weirdest Halloween name we could think of at recess.” This sounded interesting, so I settled down for the scoop. “Well,” she said enthusiastically. “We started with my friend who is friends with this family that named their kids ‘Moss’ and ‘Cricket,’ but we thought those were too normal. So we decided on ‘Bob.'” She smiled triumphantly. “‘Bob’ is my dad’s name,” I said, “and kind of normal.” “It is so not normal, dad,” she informed me. “It’s just weird.”

While “Bob” is pretty spooky, I’ve always felt that the spookiest fruit name is Pomegranate. The name comes from the Latin pomum granatum, or “apple of many seeds” and it has been around longer than The Mummy-ancient varieties were cultivated in Mesopotamia. Pomegranates pack a nutritional wallop with potassium and powerful antioxidants that can help protect your blood lipids and may even stop plaque from accumulating on arterial walls like the green goo in “Ghostbusters.” The trick is how to eat one in a white shirt. The juice, just like blood, will stain your clothes. We recommend carefully cutting off the ends (top and bottom) and then scoring the sides in 4 parallel lines down the outside of the skin with a knife. Score lightly so that the line breaks the red outer layer but doesn’t cut through the pithy white layer inside. Once that is done, you can easily break the fruit apart in a bowl of water to avoid any errant red spray. Once you’ve divided it into four pieces, peel back the rind and watch the seeds fall to the bottom of the bowl while the rind floats to the top. Strain or pull out the seeds and enjoy. There is a great video showing this process on YouTube. Search for “Produce Picker, Episode 7, Pomegranate” and you should find it.