Meringue ghosts? Check. Jack o’lanterns? Check. Chocolate spiders? Oh wait, here they come - straight from the pages of Sharon Bowers’ fun new cookbook, “Ghoulish Goodies.”

CHOCOLATE SPIDER CLUSTERS
Makes about 24
Ingredients:
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
2 cups chow mein noodles
¼ cup red hots or red mini M&Ms

Directions:
1. Line 2 baking sheets with wax paper or parchment. Melt chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl in a microwave oven on high power 60 seconds; stir well. If not quite smooth, continue to heat in two or three 10-second bursts, stirring well after each burst.

2. Stir chow mein noodles into melted chocolate and drop mixture by tablespoons onto prepared baking sheets. Press 2 red candies onto one edge of each cluster to make eyes and lift a few chow mein legs up to give a spidery impression. Refrigerate about 20 minutes to cool and harden. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 1 week.
— Sharon Bowers, “Ghoulish Goodies”

We’ve been giggling madly over Sharon Bowers’ clever new cookbook, “Ghoulish Goodies” (Storey Publishing, $14.95), and its scary-fun recipes for peanut butter monsters, Cheddar eyeballs and pretzel rod toes. We’ll share her darling recipe for chocolate spiders tomorrow, but first, here’s a handful of Bowers’ quickie party ideas, in case you still need inspiration for those classroom parties tomorrow:

Pumpkin Rice Krispie Treats: Make your usual krispie treats, but after you melt the marshmallows with butter, remove a small portion and tint it green. Tint the rest orange, then add Rice Krispies separately to orange and green mixtures. (Don’t try to tint after adding the cereal as the mixtures won’t dye properly, cautions Bowers.) With buttered hands, mold orange pumpkins and add green stems.

Screaming Red Punch: Rinse a new surgical rubber glove thoroughly. Fill it with cold water and tie the wrist with a twist tie. Freeze solid. In a large punch bowl, mix up a batch of red punch. Just before serving, cut off the glove with scissors and drop in the frozen hand.
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Out of all the tempting things in Julia Usher’s yummy new book, “Cookie Swap,” these meringue ghosts may be the most adorable — and the easiest. They’re filled with date nut balls but you can skip that step (actually steps #2 and 3) entirely and just pipe the meringue directly onto a baking sheet

MERINGUE GHOSTS
Makes about 2 dozen
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We are in such a Halloween-y mood these days, thanks in large part to Julia Usher’s new book, “Cookie Swap: Creative Treats to Share Throughout the Year” (Gibbs Smith, 160 pages, $19.99). Why, the former Bay Area engineer-turned-bakery diva asks, should the winter holidays get all the good cookies? Halloween ought to get its share of gingerbread too in the form of haunted houses, or spice cookie balls formed into tiny vine-festooned pumpkins.

So today we’re sharing her recipe for candy corn cookies - a particularly yummy take on ye olde sugar cookie, flavored with a hint of maple. Come back tomorrow for more as we count down to Halloween!
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There’s more to the college experience than fascinating lectures, frat parties and pricey textbooks. There’s all that ramen, for one thing. So this morning’s Times, Trib and Merc food sections featured a piece on dorm cooking - easy cooking ideas that are equally at home at the big U or in harried non-college households, too. An egg-laced, flavorful Greek lemon soup and a simple Greek salad can be whipped up in short order, and require nothing more than a rice cooker (for the soup) and a chopping board and knife (for the salad). Make fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs in a mug, or whip up microwaveable biscuits. And there’s more, including an Asian-inspired pasta salad with shredded chicken and vegetables (pictured), microwaved sweet potatoes with brown sugar, and more. Check it out!

In all the hustle and bustle of getting through the day, sometimes dinnertime gets short shrift. Or frozen/fast food/pizza shrift. So this week, we’re giving away a copy of “The Gastrokid Cookbook: Feeding a Foodie Family in a Fast-Food World.” It’s by two dads, Hugh Garvey - Bon Appetit magazine features editor - and Matthew Yeomans, and features such tasty fare as Mac & Cheese Maximus, the Gastrokid Burger and Zucchini Hummus. Very fun.

And it can be yours! Click “comments” and tell us, what’s your go-to supper dish when time is short and tummies are rumbly? We’ll pluck a winner’s name on Monday. (Congrats by the way to Judy, who won last week’s “Charlie & Lola” Halloween DVD giveaway!)

Got some pint sized chefs at home? Or just some pint sized diners? Lisa Barnes’ “Petit Appetit: Eat Drink & Be Merry” is just the ticket. This family cookbook features recipes for more than 150 organic, kid-friendly snacks, drinks and party fare, from cheesecake-like pumpkin tarts to sparkling limeade, confetti slaw and more. Yum. We’re giving away a copy this week and all you have to do is tell us, what did you serve at your kid(s) last birthday party? We’ll draw a winner’s name next Monday.

(Congrats, by the way, to Judy who won last week’s wonderful “Super Granny” book!)

Too mouthwateringly adorable. We always make a flag cake for Fourth of July - and stars and stripes cookies too. So naturally, this photo on BrightIdeas.com caught our attention. Not sure about the recipe though, which involves layering squares of frozen pound cake with instant vanilla pudding and broken up Snickers bars. It sounds kinda like an ad for Sara Lee, Jell-O and the Mars company, which - surprise! - owns the Bright Ideas site. Better idea: use the gorgeous photo as inspiration for your own stars and stripes cake. It doesn’t matter what kind of cake you use for the base… mmmm, chocolate? Ice it in white buttercream (which is more picnic-friendly than the whipped cream BrightIdeas used), and adorn it with blueberries and strawberries or raspberries. This year we’re trying a Barefoot Contessa cake that uses obscene amounts of butter and cardiologist banned numbers of eggs, plus a cream cheese frosting and raspberries and bloobs. Yum. What’s on your Fourth of July menu?

This weekend is the fifth annual Great American Backyard Campout, a National Wildlife Federation-sponsored activity designed to get families outdoors and in tune with nature. So much fun. And it got us all nostalgic for the many campouts we did when our kids were small. Ah, the s’mores, the hikes, the ghostly bedtime stories… and the homemade ice cream we made using a coffee can. So it was big fun to get an e-mail this morning from Rachael Ray’s people with a recipe for… homemade ice cream using a coffee can. (Pause while we ask, where do Peet’s and Starbucks devotees find coffee cans? No, that’s not, like, a lightbulb joke. We really want to know. Do they buy Folgers and throw away the innards?) OK, on to the how-tos…
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All that talk about fruity popsicles a couple of weeks ago got us thinking about ice cream sandwiches. Mmmm. Sure, you could pick up a box of them at the supermarket, but they’re so much better when they’re homemade. And they’re even better when you monkey around with ingredient combinations.

At home, we use thin, homemade chocolate cookies (a basic roll-out sugar cookie dough, with cocoa powder mixed in) to make chocolate-chocolate ice cream sandwiches - the trick is to let the ice cream soften slightly, then cut inch-thick slices of the stuff and use the same cookie cutter you used on your cookies to cut rounds of ice cream. A fluted cookie cutter gives the ice cream a nice edge too. Serve them at once, or wrap them in plastic and tuck them in the freezer. (Tip: The thicker the cookie, the harder it will be to eat once it’s been frozen.)

Other great combos: Read the rest of this entry »