Homemade Peanut Butter Cups are Wickedly Good

By Katie Barreira

As a child, it was difficult to imagine anything more awesome than holding up adults for candy while in disguise. But I was lucky enough to have a pair of fairy god neighbors who sweetened the Halloween jackpot. More hair raising than the Pinsky’s haunted garage, more engrossing than Mrs. Feldman’s eyeball punch, the enchanted Victorian at 14 Ferncroft Road promised a special and, to my parents dismay, sizeable confection meant just for me.

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Easy Caramel Corn for Ghosts and Goblins

By Sandy Hu

I’m probably the only kid in America who never went trick or treating. Well, my sister. My mom was the overprotective type who imagined danger lurking in every dark doorway of family-friendly Hilo, Hawaii.

So to compensate, I’ve always made sure my kids did the rounds Halloween night. When David was in pre-school, we lived in a condominium with almost no other children. To ensure that he had a real trick-or-treat experience, but also, to keep from being a nuisance to neighbors, I put a decorated sign-up sheet in the laundry room and we visited only those apartments that were willing to welcome a little ghost or goblin.

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Sugar and Spice

By Marilyn Hunter

Autumn leaves. Crisp nights. Cooler days. Not here.

Autumn looks very different in L.A. It’s slow to arrive and sometimes impossible to tell one season from the next. At least there’s one thing we can depend on this time of year…pumpkin patches! I know fall is officially here when pumpkins begin to appear.

The boys love the fall season for two reasons: pumpkins and trick or treating. I love this time of year for pumpkins and pumpkin pie spice. Food is one of the biggest pleasures the seasons bring and I love to celebrate the change of seasons by baking. For me, the flavor of pumpkin pie spice signals the arrival of fall. I like to add it to pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, even sprinkled on my morning yogurt.

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Soup for two! Plus Leftovers

By Lori Powell

Soup time is here. I had to turn the heat on yesterday. I realized that my hands had lost some of their feeling due to how cold my kitchen was without the oven on...which I must admit, is a rare thing. It would have been lovely to have my hands wrapped around a mug of homemade soup.

In my neck of the Hudson Valley, the arrival of fall carries with it the aroma of dried leaves (carpeting the floor of my front yard which I will have to address soon) and wood burning in someone’s fireplace or wood stove (I have neither and yearn for one or the other) with smoke that wafts in the direction of my house.

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A Spa Day for Your Wok

By Katie Barreira

This week in the test kitchen, we were working on recipes that required a wok. Even in professional kitchens, less frequented equipment have a way of hiding best when you need it most. A fly on the wall that day would have heard,

“Do we have a wok?”
“Yeah, I know I’ve used it before, but I haven’t seen it recently.”
“Do you remember packing it? Maybe it got lost in the move.”
“How do you lose a wok?!”

Once unearthed and inspected for quality assurance we concluded that our carbon steel wok had received no love. But that was about to change. A bit of research in our cookbook library uncovered an excellent wok priming primer by Chinese cookbook author and wok connoisseur, Grace Young. Armed with good counsel and some steel wool, we undertook a transformation on par with Michael Caine’s makeover of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. Our wok has never looked, or cooked, better.

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