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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Going Bananas

By Sandy Hu

Growing up in Hawaii, I know a thing or two about bananas. We ate enough of them as kids. Apple Bananas, Bluefields, Cavendish…so many varieties thrive in tropical climates. And mostly we got them for free, a gift from somebody’s backyard.

We ate bananas in many ways – fried in butter with brown sugar for dessert, suspended in glistening Jell-O for a snack or scattered over cornflakes for breakfast.

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Last Chance: Watermelon Salad

By Lori Powell

The last dog days of summer…humid, hot and in this case, very wet with rain. I start thinking of fall but then again I decided that we should wait just a bit more and savor the last of summer produce.

I’m not sure about you but in my neck of the woods it has been hotter than…. Standing in a sauna, but fully clothed and cooking. Makes me want to consume things that are laden with juice, such as the lovely watermelon, and that doesn’t require fire to eat. So many great things can be made with any of the varieties that you might find at your local farmers’ market, from yellow to red, from large to small, from salsas to cooling drinks.

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A Look at Special Fork’s New Office

By Sandy Hu

We’ve been laboring hard, getting Special Fork off the ground. And this summer, we renovated our old kitchen to make a real office for Special Fork.

Until then, we had two kitchens: our remodeled one where you see us doing food demos for Special Fork’s Video Fridays and our old kitchen, which was still functional. We removed the appliances, chipped out the wall tile and refinished the floor. It was an exciting process.

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What to Eat when Irene Comes Calling

By Lori Powell

While on vacation in Maine this year we had an unexpected and uninvited guest, “Irene.”

I have rented a house on the coast of Maine for many years now and just love it there for so many reasons – the food, the people, the gorgeous landscape, the lobsters and how peaceful it is…well every year but this one!

Irene arrived with bluster and some rain. But really, I can’t complain since the rain was minimal and considering what happened up at my house in the Hudson Valley (third worst flooding in the area’s history), this was just a lot of cool wet wind in my part of Maine.

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