Turn Leftover Halloween Candy into Dinner

By Katie Barreira

In his stand-up comedy, Bill Cosby does a bit about the morning that his wife tasked him with feeding the children breakfast. His brood, seeing this changing of the guard as an opportunity, asks Dad for chocolate cake. Considering the request, Cosby ticks off the ingredients in chocolate cake…eggs, milk, wheat… “That’s nutrition!” he concludes.

And so, the giddy children sit down to a breakfast of chocolate cake. “And then,” says Cosby in his best ghost story voice, “she came downstairs.” You can guess who that she might be, and how thrilled she was to discover her little hens shoveling down dessert at 7 a.m.

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Make Ghostly Halloween Treats in Minutes

Now that the kids are grown, I miss the excitement of Halloween, when we would get the kids dressed up and shepherd them around the neighborhood. Neither of my boys was big on candy so recently, I called Chris in New York and asked him what made Halloween so special. He recalled the thrill of being out in the dark, the ghostly home decorations, jack-o-lanterns on front porches and the adults dressed in costume dispensing treats. San Francisco’s temperate fall weather also contributed to the enjoyment of the evening.

As a trick-or-treat “deprived” child myself, I’m glad Chris has such fond childhood memories. (Out of deference to his mom, he left out the middle school Halloween years when he gathered with other boys from school, when daring but harmless “tricks” were more fun that “treats.”)

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Halloween Candy…Yum!!

By Lori Powell

After the autumn leaves comes the arrival of our spookiest of holidays, Halloween. I am ready for it this year with three bags of candy and I will be taking part of my neighborhood ghost walk. Since my town dates back to the 1600s there is a ton of history here and, well, some residents just have never left…spooky!

I am always hopeful that we will have a bunch of trick-or-treaters and I am always surprised the next day by how much candy didn’t get gobbled up.

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