'eclipse watch' party food?

Apparently we're having a small eclipse party at our house...friends and family.

Need ideas for appropriate foods other than 'moon pies' or something???

I asked this question to my wife emphasizing it needs to be eclipse theme and she blurted out "Sun dried tomatos" and we had a good laugh.

I hope someone has better ideas because I am raking my brain and coming up with nothing at the moment.

For real parties ideas I always found deli meats and lettuce to be a hit.

What about music?

Serving Sunny D and Sun Chips. Here's the playlist I came up with
Bangles – Eternal Flame
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart
Smash Mouth – Walkin on the sun
Sugar Ray – Every Morning
Gravity Four – Chariots of Fire
Death Cab for Cutie – No Sunlight
The Strokes – Under Cover of Darkness
Bill Withers – Aint no Sunshine
Coldplay – A Sky full of Starts
Chaim Topol – Sunrise/Sunset
Pink Floyd – Eclipse
Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun
Duran Duran – New Moon on Monday
They Might Be Giants – Why does the Sun Shine
Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
Marian Call – Good Morning Moon
Katrina & The Waves – Walking on Sunshine
Stevie Wonder – A Place in the Sun
George Michael/Elton John – Don’t let the Sun go Down on Me
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising
The Beatles – Here comes the Sun
Hollywood Principal & Dr. Awkward – Solar Eclipses
Don McLean - Vincent (Starry Starry Night)
Cat Stevens – Moonshadow
The Beatles – Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
Carly Simon – You’re So Vain.

From: food52.com

This is an interesting note:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4483865-texas-county-issues-state-of-emergency-ahead-of-eclipse-tourism-surge/

Make up a sliced meat and cheese tray with small round slices, and place the meat on top of the cheese to mimic the waxing to totality and then the waning. It could be fun. Have to have circular crackers, too!

j

Thanks Anne and Jim and Timothy!

That's given me the thought to get out the round cookie cutters...I think I might even have a cresent.

No deli meats here but I think I can cut rounds from the tempeh and sour dough bread?

....and some pink floyd

Anne, we've had some of the same travel warnings here...schools and some businesses are closing for the day.

I hadn't thought too much about it until  old friends coming from the west coast and a cousin from the north have timed their visits for the eclipse.

Oh, you can take the idea in several directions. Tempeh and sourdough would work fine. Even simply skipping the deli meats and arranging round cheese slices on round sourdough bread would work.

j

Judith Browning wrote:

No deli meats here but I think I can cut rounds from the tempeh and sour dough bread?

Some sort of sunchoke dish?

Apples or any round fruit sliced as rounds. Oranges would look "sunny".

Sunflower seeds - maybe buy sunflower seed butter and make some sort of dip out of it?

Jay Angler wrote:Some sort of sunchoke dish?

Are there actual recipes with sunchokes???

Cris Fellows wrote:Are there actual recipes with sunchokes???

My friend slices them thinly and bakes them until they're crispy. I could ask her for a specific instructions if you want.

Compliments of my Old Farmer's Almanac "Moon Calendar":

The Moon has inspired many people throughout history, including culinary creators. Here are a few popular foods with lunar names:
• Moon milk (warm cow or nut milk with honey and herbs/spices)
• Moon pies
• Moon cakes (Asian sweet round pastry)

Also, perhaps:
• Circle Sandwiches made with two-tone bread (white & wheat or rye) cut in eclipse phases
• Croissant Sandwiches with Swiss Cheese
• Little dippers (pretzels connected with marshmallows)
• Carrots and Cucumbers sliced in crescent and star shapes (or any fruit or veggie...)
• Eclipse Tostadas (recipe )
• Circle crackers with star-shape-cut cheeses

Hope your party is wonderful no matter what you make!

credit: CoolMomEats

So glad you guys get an eclipse this year!  We loved the big 2017 eclipse up here in OR.

Taking it another direction:  Seafood, because the tides are pulled and influenced by the moon.

Jay Angler wrote:

Cris Fellows wrote:Are there actual recipes with sunchokes???

My friend slices them thinly and bakes them until they're crispy. I could ask her for a specific instructions if you want.

Oven temperature would help poor little me.

R Dell wrote:Compliments of my Old Farmer's Almanac "Moon Calendar":

The Moon has inspired many people throughout history, including culinary creators. Here are a few popular foods with lunar names:
• Moon milk (warm cow or nut milk with honey and herbs/spices)
• Moon pies
• Moon cakes (Asian sweet round pastry)

Also, perhaps:
• Circle Sandwiches made with two-tone bread (white & wheat or rye) cut in eclipse phases
• Croissant Sandwiches with Swiss Cheese
• Little dippers (pretzels connected with marshmallows)
• Carrots and Cucumbers sliced in crescent and star shapes (or any fruit or veggie...)
• Eclipse Tostadas (recipe )
• Circle crackers with star-shape-cut cheeses

Hope your party is wonderful no matter what you make!

credit: CoolMomEats

Thank you R. Dell!
Great ideas...and I love the photo of cookies with the moon phases.

Riona Abhainn wrote:So glad you guys get an eclipse this year!  We loved the big 2017 eclipse up here in OR.

Taking it another direction:  Seafood, because the tides are pulled and influenced by the moon.

We had only a partial in 2017 and that was pretty cool so looking forward to a total but really, mostly, looking forward to the folks that are coming to visit .

If you invite enough people, you don't have to make the food:) During the 2017 total eclipse, we were right in the middle of the path and had a big party, like 100+ people in our front yard, most of whom we'd never met before. We found random groups of people looking for a place to watch the eclipse, and invited them over, and told them to bring the yum-yums. The eclipse was kind of a disappoinment. I was expecting it to get pitch black like in the middle of the night, it was more like a really cloudy day. But the food was bussin.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:

Jay Angler wrote: My friend slices them thinly and bakes them until they're crispy. I could ask her for a specific instructions if you want.

Oven temperature would help poor little me.

My Friend says:

Just use a mandolin to slice them thinly. Don’t bother peeling.
Shallow or deep fry them until they turn golden. Drain well. Salt lightly as for potato chips.  

When she "shallow" fries things, it's in her big cast iron frying pan.

Hope this helps!

Our big one was 2017, so interesting that one person's "big one" is another person's "partial".  We had a partial last year in autumn, but I don't really care about those anymore having experienced the real mccoy.

Moonpies

This is what I'm thinking ... Orange Jello shots with a dark chocolate base (booze optional); "Dark and Eclipsy" cocktail (Dark and Stormy, and add blood orange juice to the lime juice, float the dark rum); bleu cheese gougers (the moon is still made of cheese, no?) filled with foie gras mousse (poetic license with respect to Mother Goose writing about cats with fiddles), squid ink pasta salad with "sun-dried" (oven-roasted) red/orange/yellow cherry tomatoes (char marks are sun spots) - dressed with saffron tonnato sauce; tsukune (Japanese chicken thigh meatballs - Japan ... Land of the Rising Sun), Lava cake.  Sun tea (you can even mix orange pekoe and black tea), Corona, Blue Moon, ISS Toolbag (Vodka and Tang - to memorialize the toolbag dropped from the ISS last November.  It had to contain Screwdriver, right!?).

Let your imagination run wild!  We're even serving Caymus "The Walking Fool" from their SuiSUN (pronounced suh-SOON) vineyard simply because we have a friend who's family name is a homophone of Gibbous.  People did walk on the moon, but they were not fools.  They were/are fearless patriots who have a bigger understanding of how to serve than most - military exempt from comparison.

Enjoy the parties, and don't stare into the sun!  Thanks to the previous poster for the play list!!!

We didn't have a party, but we did have a picnic in the most secluded place we could find in a state forest. All the photos of the eclipse I've seen are though good lenses with filters and all that. They are great pictures, but it isn't what it really looks like, it's what that equipment records not what you actually see. Here, almost perfectly is what it really looks like to the naked eye. The white dot, below and to the right is Venus.