I remember it like it was yesterday – laying in bed, completely
entranced in the fiery excitement of it all. It was nothing I had ever
experienced. My senses were heightened, an obsession had begun.
I was experiencing my first real autumn.
Growing up in New Orleans, fall was something that just … happened. The
days went from excessively hot, to a little less hot, to bearably warm
with the occasional jolt of cold (Cold, of course, being temperatures
in the 50s. Brrrr). The leaves bypassed that whole color-change thing
everyone always talks about. It was green to dead and that was that.
That is, until I began my freshman year in Maryland at Goucher College.
As I plucked away at my snooze button, cursing the existence of a 9:30
am class, I rolled over and froze. There they were – red, orange,
yellow and every combination between the three.
Once I was able to tear myself away from the window, I sprinted down the hall. “Have you seen them? They’re beautiful!”
Halloween
Halloween
I Love Horror
When my brother and I were 4 1/2 we were taken to see a movie called X-76 Bloodrust. I can’t find a single living soul who has ever heard of this movie. Not even John Landis. What I gleaned about the plot, which was observed through a space between two fingers covering my eyes, was that this undulating creature (that looked like vomit, by the way) was created in a Sparkletts bottle, and if it touched you, you would die. I think it might have been the poorer cousin of The Blob.
The denouement had this vomit creature trying to force its way out of a baggage hold in an airplane and the passengers freaking out. My brother slept with a nightlight for the next 11 years. His head wrapped tightly with the sheet and just the tip of his nose poking out so he could breath, because we all know that monsters can’t touch sheets or blankets. I on the other hand became fascinated with Science Fiction and horror.
Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s and Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London (definitely more sexy than Lon Chaney Jr.) I even remember an early Humphrey Bogart chiller called The Return of Dr.X. where he played a man who had been executed and was brought back to life by the laziest of plot devices: electricity. His line to the girl he kidnapped and brought to a remote cabin will stay with me forever: “Don’t bother to scream, no one can hear you”, as he pulls out the biggest fuckin’ hypodermic needle I’d ever seen. Thass what I’m talking ‘bout!
One for the Table's Favorite Halloween Party Treats
Spicy Pumpkin Dip
Spicy Pumpkin Seeds
Crescent Mummy Dogs
Cider Cheese Fondue
Curried Butternut Squash Soup
Forty Cloves of Garlic Soup
Amy Sherman's Pumpkin Soup
Tangy Sriracha Pumpkin-Parmesan Soup
Red & Black Scary Apples
Sweet and Salty Caramel Apples
Candy Corn Cake
Sticks and Stones Candy Bark
Homemade Lollipops
Spiderweb Cookie Pizza
Pumpkin Pecan Cookies
Pumpkin Chai Pots de Creme with Pumpkin Seed Brittle
Maple Syrup Pie
Homemade Chocolate Truffles
Pumpkin Cheesecake
Pumpkin Bread Pudding with Maple and Pecans
FOR ADULTS ONLY
Black Cat | Bloody Mary | The Headless Horseman | Sleepy Hollow | Spider Cider
Matt's Winter Cocktail | Zombie
Corpse Reviver #2 - For the next day.
Forty Cloves of Garlic Soup with Pistachio-Crusted Shrimp
Despite my family of garlic haters, I love garlic. And I love lots of
it in all forms. A very close older family friend eats it raw and
rubbed on toast, then spread with butter or rendered duck fat. It's now
his daily health ritual since he learned garlic has been shown to keep
the heart healthy and keep cancer at bay. Maybe he knows a thing or
two, because he's going to be 90 next year. Sometimes I even indulge in
a slice of garlic toast too. Though I try to keep the practice at a
minimum because I don't want to go around smelling. Even so, almost all
my cooking and the recipes on this site start with sautéing garlic.
Garlic is just one of those vegetables that many people use and it
crosses many cultural boundaries. It's a base flavor in Mediterranean,
Asian, and North African cuisine. I have always wanted to use garlic
for something more than just a base, instead a main ingredient.
A
few weeks ago I had the idea of making garlic soup. With the chilly
weather here in the Northeast, I was craving a warming and comforting
soup packed with flavor. But when thinking about garlic soup,
'comforting' might not be the exact word that comes to mind for
everybody. Most people hate garlic for its pungent taste and odor, but
boiling it really tames its pungency. The garlic becomes mellow but
still keeps all the wonderful properties of its unique flavor. Another
bonus of this preparation is that there is much less smell after eating
compared to sautéed garlic. Garlic haters might actually change their
minds after eating this soup.
Halloween at Park Towne Place
In Philadelphia there is an apartment complex on the Benjamin Franklin
Parkway called Park Towne Place. It is a cluster of four high rises –
cleverly called East, West, North and South. I had three friends who
lived there – Laura, Adam and Erik – and most years I spent Halloween
night with them, riding the elevators in our costumes and tearing
through the hallways, ringing every bell we could get our little hands
on in an effort to collect maximum quantities of candy.
It was widely understood that trick-or-treating in an apartment
building was the most efficient way to trick-or-treat, and for that
reason Park Towne Place was the ne plus ultra because there were four
apartment buildings arranged in one lucky clover shape – the prospect
of that much candy simply boggled the nine-year-old mind. Our method
was to exit the elevator, dash up and down the hallways ringing every
bell, and then we’d wait a breathless moment to see who answered their
door.
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