Tonight is the night for ghosts, ghouls and goblins to walk among us. Most of them will be after your candy supplies, and hopefully the gremlins will stay out of your kitchen. Just remember not to feed any cute lil’ critters after midnight!

For me, the end of the day ushers in thoughts of the Thanksgiving Holiday to come. In that bent I will be posting a collection of the best holiday recipes I’ve been ble to find, as well as a few that have been tried and true staples on my holiday table for years.

Most of what I’ll be posting are updated versions of some holiday classics, from appetizers to the dreaded Green Bean Casserole… (Now that’s a Halloween-ish thought. It gives me shivers every time! Scary!) Some I just can’t bear the thought of messing with, so they will be presented as my family has always made them. (Let’s face it, you don’t mess with perfection!)

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AB has never done me wrong. Oh, I’ve done his recipes wrong in the past, but on closer inspection it always turned out to be something that I did, vs. anything that was incorrect in the procedures or methods he handed out. He did us right again this time, and I thank him for it greatly.

My wife whipped these up for breakfast the other morning. All-in-all, it took roughly twice as long as it would have to use a mix, and the result was so much better that I’ll never consider the mix version again. To be honest, I don’t have a lot to say about these, or the process. Just that they were a hit with the entire family, from myself, to Mr. Seat of his Diapers, everyone loved them.

Even Buster our Boston Terrier managed to sneak a few bites. (Though I think Lil’ man might have helped!)

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I love Japanese and Chinese noodle soups almost as much as I like stir fry. The flavors are simple, pleasing and sustaining while still managing to be very light, something most American soups and stews cannot accomplish. This is an Asian inspired soup. This dish was not made from any traditional recipe, I just added flavors that remind me of other soups I’ve had in the past and with a pretty good result if I do-say-so-myself.

If you’re looking at the title and wondering where to get yourself some nyumen noodles or why you’ve never heard of them, they are simply somen noodles served warm. The Japanese are famous for giving a whole new term to something if it’s prepared differently, and this is one of those cases.

This meal actually started its life as a stir fry, but just as I was getting ready to go to it, my wife mentioned that she’d like a soup. In my mind there really wasn’t an issue there, and I grabbed the last of my somen from the pantry and put it on to boil, using a method I learned several years ago for cooking udon noodles, which I will detail below.

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What does a foodie make for lunch? Perhaps a better way to phrase that question is to ask what a foodie who generally hits the kitchen with no idea what he’s about to make cooks for lunch, because when I threw this together I had absolutely no concept of what I was going to do with what I had, just that I needed lunch on the table in under 30 minutes and I wanted it to be a fairly light meal. The result was, as are most truly inspired culinary moments, sublime. In the end the dish was light, slightly spicy and just enough for two (with the addition of a little bread to sop up the leftover juices).

Why chutney you ask? To be honest, I had no idea that I’d made a chutney until I looked it up this morning. For me the process went more like this:

• Notice the time, blurt out a chosen expletive and run for the kitchen.
• Throw open the fridge to see what’s available for a trip to the stove top, decide on super thin pork chops because they cook quickly.
• Tear open the pantry and rummage, not finding anything that looked good at the moment.
• Switch to the freezer… We haven’t had corn in a while, but what to do with it…
• AHA!

It’s those “AHA” moments that make cooking a joy for me. They are the culmination of the methods I’ve learned, the flavor combinations I’ve tried and the skills acquired in my 20-plus years of cooking. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it was a resounding success, and in the process I discovered something.

Chutney isn’t necessarily all that exotic.

That may strike some of my more experienced foodie friends as quite humorous. Chutney, by definition, isn’t complicated stuff at all. The fact is, I’ve always thought of chutney as some exotic concoction that only classically trained chefs whip out on anything like a regular basis. I also never realized that I’ve been putting them together for over a decade without ever knowing that was what I was doing.

To Quote CooksOnline.com, Chutney is simply:

A sauce or relish containing fruits, spices and herbs.

Hmmm. Been there, done that. And they’re good!

So why, you may ask, didn’t I just write this up as an entry on how to make chutney? Well, the simple fact of the matter is that this particular variant requires a pan that’s had pork seared in it. It just wouldn’t be right without it. So I’m suggesting this as a substitute for the apple sauce that so many people seem to slather on their poor lil’ unsuspecting chops.

But enough of this dissertation… On with the food!

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It’s been a while since I mentioned the package that was sent to me by CurrySimple. To be honest, I was on such a curry kick for a while that I burned myself out on the concept of trying any of the three remaining pouches in the box.

When we moved in to the new house, the package went missing for a bit. I ran across it the other day in the “pile of things we haven’t unpacked yet” in my bedroom closet and immediately knew I had to give it another shot. The problem was, I still had three choices and I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted to try first. It took me two days to decide on their Gourmet Yellow Curry Sauce and I’m glad that I did.

This dish is decidedly simple and relies on some pretty simple ingredients and can be whipped up by anyone. It came to be simply because these are the things that I had in my fridge, freezer and pantry. The whole affair took about 30 minutes, including cooking the rice and was happily gobbled down by the adults in the house in near record time.

The cauliflower went incredibly well with the curry, as did the pork. The red, green and yellow bell peppers added just the right combination of sweet, tart and in-betweens to make this a tongue-tingling experience, but to be honest, this curry is only the tiniest bit spicy, and in my mind could have used just a hair more of a bite, even the next day.

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If there is one thing that I as my wife to make more than anything else, it’s her particular take on banana bread, zucchini bread falls in at a close second. To be honest, I’m a sucker for just about any bread that features nuts or vegetables… Or beer. The combination of flavors, textures and the aroma that fills the house while these breads are baking is something that really can’t be described, but belongs in every homeowners manual under “the first thing you should do to break in your new home.”

Apparently our friend Naomia feels the same way. She’s heading off on a tour of duty in Japan, and the one thing she asked my wife to make for her before she left was banana bread. You won’t hear any complaints from me. I’m glad she asked for it, because I, as the resident food blogger, get a mini-loaf all to myself.

As a matter of course, all of our mixed, kneaded or otherwise manipulated products have been handled in our very trusty K.A. mixer. Tonight’s foray into baking got me thinking that perhaps I could use my own cooking-specific mixer. In that bent, my guy-ish instincts are pulling me towards the Hamilton Beach® Eclectrics® Mixer, mostly because it just looks cooler.

The other reason I’d prefer to have my own Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer is that I tend to abuse my cooking equipment a bit more heavily than my wife does, and I would prefer to leave hers pastry-fresh, rather than one that has been tainted with cooking oils or other ingredients that are harmful to the care and feeding of doughs and other bakery-type stuff that I have no comprehension of.

If I had to give a third reason, it’s because the Hamilton Beach® Mixer is quieter than our existing unit. That means I can actually talk to my wife while it’s disseminating all of the things that I feed a mixer when I’m attempting something unusual. while this might play out as a dismal failure culinarily, it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like my own toys to play with.

Having said that, I’ll let you in on my wife’s recipe. Please do enjoy!

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Basically, lumpia is the Filipino equivalent of the Chinese egg roll. I first experienced lumpia in my early 20’s, when our Guamanian next door neighbor made them and presented them to us as a housewarming gift, along with a massive platter of kelaguen. It was a nearly religious experience for me, even at the beginnings of my love affair with food. I’ve been hooked ever since and I have no intention of turning back.

When I mentioned this to my wife, she grinned, went to work, and brought home a huge tray of lumpia few days later. It seems that one of her coworkers’ wives was from Guam also, and once again I was carried away on the wings of culinary angels to a place I’ve never been, but that I dream of going to one day. They say the best way to experience the world is through its food, and I agree.

After that couple moved away, I decided we’d try to make this on our own. Unfortunately I never got the recipe from the lovely lady who made them for us, so we were on our own. Off to Google!

I’m really not sure if any of the recipes I found when I was looking this up are actually authentic, but the one we did find seemed to mirror most closely the ingredients we grow in the region and in the spirit of “cook locally”, I adapted it to fit not only what we had around the area, but also what we had around the house. I saw many that called for cabbage, and then there were many that didn’t. We had it on hand but chose not to include it in this recipe, as it’s slated for another wrapped food recipe we’ve been talking about for a few weeks now. (If nothing else, I’ve been dying to try Colcannon, and it will give me the perfect excuse!)

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We interrupt our regular programming to bring you the following news bulletin!

This just came in my email, and I think it’s something all of us should be aware of.

CDC is collaborating with public health officials in multiple states across the United States and with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service to investigate an ongoing multi-state outbreak of Salmonella I,4,[5],12:i:- (pronounced “four five twelve eye minus”) infections in humans.

Advice to consumers

At this time, CDC recommends that people do not eat any Banquet pot pies or pot pies made by ConAgra Foods that have a printed code ending in “P9.” Other brands of pot pies made in the ConAgra Foods factory that makes Banquet brand pot pies and sold under other brand names may also be contaminated with Salmonella. These other pot pie boxes also have a printed code ending in “P9″. If you have any of these products at home, the safest thing to do is to discard them.

Full details can be found at NewsEmergency.com.

I know a lot of us probably have those lil’ pies hanging out in the back of our freezers, hidden under the frozen berries or vegetables, just alongside the farm raised organic whatever that was lovingly hand fed for each day of its life, then given a bath. Especially those of us with young children. So if you do, please check the code, if it’s “P9″, toss ‘em.

Now back to our regularly scheduled goodness.

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I’ve been blaming a lot of other food bloggers for my entries here lately, and today seems to be more of the same. This time it was Katerina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking who decided my fate for me. I was just taking my daily dose of food blogs when I ran across her recipe for Acorn Squash with Toasted Seeds, and I knew I had to make it, or something like it.

My first attempt was a complete disaster. Nothing I had read prepared me for the fact that acorn squash seems to amplify salt to a magnitude heretofore unknown by man. I’d used chicken stock as the liquid, and even though I use the low sodium variety, I figure that played a part in the over salinization. The resulting dish would have tasted great, if I’d been able to get past the saltiness of it, but I couldn’t. It was drain fodder, nothing more.

In the end, I looked over Katerina’s recipe again and decided I’d like to up the flavor by adding roasted garlic, cut out the chicken stock altogether and loose the toasted seeds, since my dental work didn’t find them to be all that much fun.

The resulting dish is thick, satisfying and oh-so delicious. I can honestly say that this is my own creation, since I used the original recipe only as a guideline for cooking the squash, which is of a variety I’m unused to working with. This has been an egregious oversight on my part, and I’ll not be failing to give the little forlorn acorn squash his due from now on. I crafted at least three new uses for it when I tasted this soup, and I can’t wait to see if they stand up as well as I think they will.

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I had originally meant to title this post “Ale Bread Part Deux”, but I really didn’t want to make it into any kind of a tribute to Charlie Sheen. (Not that I have anything against Charlie, mind you!)

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog over the last year, you’ll know that baking is one of my biggest fears and is something I usually leave to my wife, who excels at it. I have however, been prodded repeatedly by several people to “bite the bullet and bake us up something fab to drool over”

My last attempt at this resulted in something less than what I expected, even after several goes at it. It was enough to send me away from the baking cupboard in shame for quite some time, with every intention never to slink back to realms in which I obviously do not belong.

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