Halloween

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.

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.

“No,” I said to my husband, “you don’t get it. You can be born a vampire, or you can be made a vampire. Like being in the mob.”

“So how did Damon and Stefan get to be vampires – were they born that way?” he inquired gamely, steering the car through college town traffic on a bright, October Saturday.

“Well, in the book and the show, you know, they’re different in a lot of ways, but in the book and the show they only talk about ‘made’ vampires. In the book they became vampires because of Katherine. If a vampire drinks your blood and nothing else happens, you just die – like that girl Vicky – but if they drink your blood and then you drink some of theirs, you become a vampire, and live forever. You have to go through a lot of changes, but eventually you’re a vampire.”

“They must be great in bed after a few hundred years as guys in their twenties,” he mused.

From All About Food

It was a sunny afternoon during the last week of September. I was driving up and down rolling hills and rounding curves as I enjoyed the scenery along a Minnesota county road. I knew it was autumn when I saw a large, can’t-miss-it sign that announced Grandpa’s Pumpkin Patch. I slowed down and pulled into the driveway, even as I thought to myself this was a place to visit with a carload of young children.

Bright pumpkins in all shapes and sizes were piled in long rows, basking in the September sun. I grabbed one of the big wagons parked near the pumpkins and began filling it up as I strolled through the impressive display. I never saw Grandpa. I wanted to thank him for sorting the pumpkins by size and for having all the little pie pumpkins in a pile by themselves. I wound up with several of those cuties in my wagon.

These edible, orange winter squash are not all created equal. The big, bright, deep-ribbed pumpkins that make the best Jack-o-lanterns don’t make the best pie. And they don’t make the best Spicy Pumpkin Dip.