halloween

Halloween was the one night a year when it felt as if kids ruled the world. And we did.

Below, a step-by-step description of what, to me, makes a perfect Halloween—and which is what I lived every year in the ’70s and into the ’80s.

Step 1: Be lucky enough to be raised in a small town—for example, Interlaken, NJ—that has 1000 residents, pretty much all of whom are extended family members, or are neighbors of extended family members, or go to school with you. Either way, they’re moms who work with your mom on the PTA and have your back. Your town will have hundred-year-old trees that grow together in the middle of the street just like Ray Bradbury described in the town of his youth, and which, despite a handful of streetlights, make the town inky black at night and heap it with fragrant leaves, rich and musky, to shuffle through.

It was Mayberry—and it still is, 30 years later.

Step 2: Choose your costume at the 5 & 10 one town over. It will be acrylic, make no mistake.

Three years old, across the street at the Boyds’ house.

Or, if you are seven and your two front baby teeth have recently come out and you look three-quarters of the way to a jack o’lantern as it is, your mom might be inspired to put you in the pumpkin costume she sewed for your little sister a few years back, stuff it with bunched-up newspaper, and draw triangles around your eyes and nose and an exaggerated smile around your mouth with black eyeliner. Hypothetically speaking.

Step 3: After school, your mom sends you and your brother and sister outside to play because you’re too hopped up to be inside. You meet your friends to go trick-or-treating after dinner. Unless you’re five, you don’t go out before dark. We lived in a safe town and helicopter parents then were few. My mom had just one rule: Don’t cross Westra. (That was the one moderately busy street in our town.) The rest of the town was fair game. Once you were old enough to go trick-or-treating alone with your friends, you did—and your parents did not fret, fuss, insist on coming along in their own costumes, tell you not to eat the candy you got, make you wait to eat any until you got home so they could check it for tampering, or text you incessantly—because, saints be praised, it hadn’t been invented yet.

Pendant of candy corn encased in Lucite, circa 1973. Yes, I do still wear it.

Step 4: You stop at every house with a porch light on. You make a point to stop at the Maguras’, because Mrs. Magura makes homemade popcorn balls, and Mrs. Panes’s house, because her family owns Criterion Candies on the Asbury boardwalk, and she always gives out gorgeous candy apples. And you stop at your cousins’ because your aunt gives out the yummiest candy and the most generous handfuls. When you pass other friends on the sidewalk, you stop and brag about how much more candy you have than they have, and then you tell each other which houses have the good stuff and which have the raisins. When you’re in the mood for candy, you eat it. When you’re full, you still eat it. Because you and your friends don’t eat like this on a regular basis. It’s one night a year. It’s okay.

Card from Auntie Phyllis, circa 1977. Each of us kids got our own Halloween card.

Step 5: Once your candy bag starts getting too heavy and a thick layer of leaves has attached itself to the hem of your acrylic dress, you say goodbye to your friends. You don’t walk home, but to your other aunts’ house, where your parents and your aunts and uncles are gathered around the dining room table. After a certain point that night, they stop handing out candy to neighborhood kids, turn off their porch lights and head over to relax together with coffee and apple cider and cinnamon-sugar apple cider doughnuts. It is always the same cider and doughnuts from the same place, Delicious Orchards, because nothing—to this very day—beats them for quality. We grew up on this cider, which is unpasteurized, murky and intensely flavored (and may be why none of us has allergies) and the doughnuts are crackly and delicately crumbed.

Cider doughnuts from Delicious Orchards, on one of my beloved aunt’s dessert dishes. Worth clicking to see it bigger. Seriously.

Step 6: Go home and dump all of your candy on the living room rug, making stacks for each variety and counting how many you have of each. This was a time when there were not many ‘fun sizes’ except maybe for Milk Duds, which came in tiny boxes and you got three to a box, and Hershey Miniatures. Most other candy came in full size—big Krackels, big Charleston Chews, big Chunky bars.

Give your sister all of the Snickers and Baby Ruths because you hate peanuts and she likes them, and she will give you all of her Reese’s peanut butter cups (because you do like peanut butter and she hates that). Your dad roots around for the Mounds bars and Hershey Special Darks, which is fine because you also hate coconut and dark chocolate. (What was I thinking?) Milky Ways, Skor Bars, Rolos, Whatchamacallits and $100,000 bars (their real name) get place of privilege. Mary Janes—these you and your sister and brother throw at each other just because they’re weird, always smushed, and aren’t chocolate. If it’s not going to be chocolate, at least have the decency to be Chuckles, those luscious half-dollar sized gumdrops, or Twizzlers.

Small ceramic witch I received when I was very young. My sister has a blonde one, with a pumpkin instead of a cat.

Step 7: Eat some more. Your mom does not rush you off to bed because you go to Catholic school and tomorrow, November 1, is All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ is the result of Christianity trying to co-op the pagan holiday and is kind of a weasel move, but I’m not about to quibble with a day off, especially the day after Halloween. You put all of your candy back into your candy bag. And finally you head to bed.

I bought some Mary Janes this year just to taste them, since I never had before. They’re peanut butter-molasses chews, and I was underwhelmed. I don’t know why I was expecting a miracle. Did that stop me from sticking the rest into two envelopes and mailing them to my brother and sister? It did not.

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bowla granola

When I was a high school student away at boarding school, I ate a lot of something called Sun Country granola. My mom mailed me happy orange boxes of it, dozens, that I would consequently plow through. One Halloween I even dressed as a flower child and carried a bag of it with me as I trick or treated.  Sun Country has since disappeared from the planet (granted, it’s totally plausible that I ate it all). And I haven’t found anything that comes close to its flavor and richness.

But I do make granola, and have come up with a recipe that’s so delicious and so versatile that it helped to dry my tears. Actually, I’m not even sure you can call it a recipe. It’s just rolled oats (the Quaker oats-in-a-canister type), a sweetener of some sort, a pinch of salt and a bunch of other stuff you happen to like, in whatever quantities you like.

In the granola in these photos I used oats, honey, Turkish apricots that I snipped into bits with kitchen scissors (an admirable Nigella Lawson trick), walnuts that I toasted in a skillet first, and, because my will is so weak, dark chocolate chips. I currently have a huge crush on ground cardamom, a spice that smells like it was poured out of the flowers growing in Eve’s window box in Eden, so I added a few teaspoons of that. A pinch of salt, and that’s it.

Set your oven to 350. Take out a cookie sheet and cover it with parchment. (Don’t use a black cookie sheet or you risk charbroiling your granola.)

Next, get out a big bowl and a wooden spoon or rubber spatula. Dump your oats, a few cups’ worth, into the bowl. Stir in your sweetener, then your spice and your salt, and spread the mixture onto your cookie sheet.

Chop up your dried fruit and toast up your nuts, if you’re using them.

Pop your cookie sheet into the oven and bake for about half an hour. You want to dry it out. Stir the mixture halfway through. When it’s done, let it completely cool on a rack, and then add the rest of your stuff.

Ideas for fun taste sensations:

-Real maple syrup, pecans, cinnamon and dried apples

-Brown sugar, Karo syrup and dried figs (this’ll make it crunchy, just so you know)

-Honey, macadamia nuts, dried pineapple and toasted coconut (hel-lo)

Add a few pats of pure melted butter to your mixture, and tell me how good it was.

To get more ideas, take a road trip to a specialty store that’s famous for their fantastic supply of dried fruits and nuts. I love Delicious Orchards in Colts Neck, NJ; Whole Foods is a bang, too.

Personally, I avoid using fresh fruit in my granola because I’d have to keep it in the fridge, which would dry it out too much and make it too crunchy (I have TMJ disorder. If you have to google it, consider yourself lucky). But the stuff’s yours. Do what you want.*

I snack on this right out of the big Tupperware I keep on top of my fridge. But tonight I ate the specimen pictured below, with milk, in my favorite bowl that I bought in a whack little store in Cambridge, MA. The best cereal ever!

*Keep in mind, always and forever, that a recipe—even the ones from fancy-schmancy chefs or publications—represents only a very small consensus on what tastes good to a few particular people. Their preferences are no more important than yours. Doesn’t matter if it’s cooking, teaching a class on Aztec culture, or carving walrus figurines out of soap—design of any kind is your gig. You really can say, “Do I like this? Good, great, it’s going in.” If you like it, it works. That’s the only rule there is.

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