Pumpkin-Orange Smoothies

By Andrew Hunter

Halloween is the symbolic start of the holiday season in the Hunter household. For Marilyn and me, it’s a transitional time at the table too. Steaks and chops are on the grill less often with more roasts braised for hours on Sundays to eat the rest of the week; and our shopping trips yield fewer summer fruits and veggies and more squashes, roots and gourds.

Pumpkins this year will get carved, roasted, grilled and puréed. We like to buy small orange pumpkin, cut off the stem end, then cut in quarters, clean away the stringy and seedy insides, rub with oil, salt and pepper, and roast until soft and tender. With these chunks of soft pumpkin, we can do a bunch of things from dicing for pasta, to puréeing for soups and mashing into potatoes for an autumnal side.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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Autumn Sweet Potato Soup

By Andrew Hunter

Sweet potatoes have gone from obscurity to celebrity in the last few years. They now grace plates in every menu category, especially side dishes, of restaurants from fast food to fine dining. I’m not a nutritionist, but a simple review of their nutritional label shows some real benefits to these orange-fleshed tubers. They weigh in with fewer calories and carbs than russets and they contain more than 700% of your Vitamin A for the day…no kidding.

As a parent, sweet potatoes are the kind of veggie you hope your kids will like. Heck, I’ll even let the boys eat sweet potato fries if it makes them happy. But as summer fades into fall, and I start thinking about the chilly weather, turning leaves and woolen sweaters of my Michigan childhood, I automatically think of soup.

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Inside Special Fork: Taking a Look at our Free Cookbook

By Sandy Hu

If you follow Special Fork, you know that we blog from Monday through Friday to bring fresh stories and recipe ideas to you every weekday.

I post every Monday, with a general blog directed at the entire Special Fork community. On Tuesdays, Katie focuses on cooking newbies; on Wednesdays, Lori advises singles and couples; on Thursdays, Marilyn and Andrew reach out to busy parents; and on Fridays, we do a video blog, demonstrating a recipe from the Special Fork database.

When you type www.specialfork.com in your Internet browser, the website will recognize whether you are coming from a smartphone, such as an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone; or a computer and will serve up the right website (mobile or conventional) to you.

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Indian Summer Paletas

By Marilyn Hunter

I love Indian summer in California. Just when everyone is getting ready for sweaters and football season, Californians are enjoying the remains of those warm summer days. These are heat wave days in L.A. with temperatures into the 100s. For those of us who don’t have a pool, we often turn to popsicles for relief. And keepin’ it real in L.A. means not just any popsicle, but a Mexican paleta.

If you’ve never visited a paletería, it’s time you did. Paletas are ice pops made from fresh fruit. They come in a wide variety of flavors from mango, pineapple and tamarind to arroz con leche and cucumber with chile y limón. I once read that if summer in L.A. had a flavor, it would be mango con chile.

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