We love this party favor idea from Popcorn.org. We’d suggest them as trick-or-treat items, but many parents don’t let kids eat the “open” food for safety reasons.

So, bring them to friends, to the office, and anywhere else you like.
 
 
RECIPE: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN POPCORN
HANDS

Ingredients

 
Preparation

1. PLACE 1-3 pieces of candy corn at the end of each finger (depending on size of glove), pointy side first, to make fingernails.

2. FILL the glove with popcorn and tie it off with ribbon or yarn.

Pickled garlic is a healthful, tasty garnish and ingredient. You can buy it in jars, but it’s almost as easy to make your own.

Don’t worry about being overwhelmed by garlic flavor: The cloves lose a lot of their pungency in the pickling process. They are still garlicky, but tame.

Enjoy pickled garlic on salads, sandwiches, skewered appetizers or main courses, as a Martini garnish or as a snack like any pickles. You can also bring jars of it as house gifts—so much more interesting than most bottles of wine.

You can make the pickled garlic more of a condiment by pickling sliced onions and cucumbers along with the garlic cloves.

RECIPE: PICKLED GARLIC

Ingredients

Use pickled garlic to garnish just about anything, including canapés and crostini. Above, turkey and hummus with pickled garlic garnishes.Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Preparation

1. SEPARATE the heads of garlic into cloves, with the outer skin removed. Set aside. TIP: To soften and loosen the skins, blanch the cloves in rapidly boiling water for 30 seconds, immediately immerse in cold water, drain and peel the cloves.

2. COMBINE the vinegar, sugar, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, chiles and lemon zest in a saucepan. Bring to a boil; continue to boil for 2 minutes.

3. ADD the garlic, and continue to boil for 4 more minutes. Remove from heat and let stand overnight at room temperature.

4. TRANSFER to a clean jar. You can strain out the herbs and spices or keep them (we keep them for the aesthetic effect). Cover and store in the refrigerator; the pickled cloves will keep for 6 to 8 weeks. Over the first week, the cloves will become even more pickled.

TIP: When the garlic cloves have been consumed, taste the brine. You may want to incorporate it with oil into a salad dressing.

If you’d like to simply purchase pickled garlic, consider Rabbit’s Pickled Garlic, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week.

We love these pickled cloves, made in chipotle, habanero, habanero dill, smoke and spicy dill. Read our review.

We all know that carrots are good for us: 1 medium carrot, just 25 calories, provides 203% of our daily value of vitamin A, a powerful antioxidant.* Beyond nibbling on a carrot stick or baby carrot, though, we just don’t take enough time to think about what to do with them.

Here are two easy recipes from Grimmway Farms, a California grower of carrots (and most of the baby carrots you come across).

The carrot hummus recipe is below. Find more carrot recipes at Grimmway.com.
 
 
RECIPE: CURRIED CARROT SOUP

This dairy-free recipe is low in calories: just 91 calories per serving.

Ingredients For 6 Servings

 
Preparation

1. HEAT the olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat. Add the diced onions, diced carrots, curry powder, cumin, salt and pepper. Toss to combine and cook for about 3 minutes.

2. ADD the chicken broth and cover the pot. Continue to cook over medium heat for another 15 minutes.

3. PURÉE: Carefully remove the cover and purée the soup in batches in a blender. Alternatively, purée the soup in the pot using an immersion blender wand.

[1] Curried carrot soup (photo © Grimmway Farms).

[2] Carrots fresh from the field (photo © Jason Leung | Unsplash).

 
Nutrition Per Serving: 91 calories; 4 g total fat; 0.6 g saturated fat; 2 g monounsaturated fat; 1 g polyunsaturated fat; 0 mg cholesterol and trans fat; 946 mg sodium; 11 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 5 g protein.

Prep time is 5 minutes, cook time is 5 minutes.

Ingredients

1. PLACE all ingredients in a food processor and pulse several times to coarsely chop. Then let food processor run for about 2 minutes until smooth.

2. REMOVE hummus from food processor bowl to serving bowl, using a spatula. Serve with carrot and other vegetable chips, baby carrots and other crudités, or pita chips.

Nutrition Per Serving: 102 calories; 5g total fat; 1 g saturated fat; 0 g trans fat; 2 g monounsaturated fat; 2 g polyunsaturated fat; 0 mg cholesterol; 306 mg sodium; 11 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 4 g protein.
 
 
CARROT TRIVIA

Contrary to popular belief, baby carrots are not grown bite-sized. They are bred long and slender, and then cut into two-inch pieces and lathed to a uniform width.

 
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*Vitamin A is key to good vision, a healthy immune system, good skin, and general cell growth. It has been studied as a treatment for many other conditions, including cancers, cataracts and HIV. However, the results to date are inconclusive.
 

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Serve it as a side dish or as a salad. Is this a potato-squash mix with a garnishing of arugula, or a “salad?” Call it what you will, it makes a beautiful impression. To make it more salad-like, double the amounts of spinach and arugula.

Prep time 10 minutes, cook time 45 minutes.

The tip: Look at other favorite foods and new ways to combine them.

RECIPE: WARM POTATO & ACORN SQUASH
SALAD

Ingredients For 4-6 Servings

What a gorgeous dish! Photo courtesy Heather Scholten | Farmgirl Gourmet.

Preparation

1. PREHEAT the oven to 425°F.

2. ADD 1 teaspoon of the oil to a large baking dish and add the potatoes, squash, rosemary, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and the remaining oil. Toss lightly to coat.

3. ROAST for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the potatoes are fork tender. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes.

4. COMBINE the roasted vegetables, spinach/arugula mix and feta in a large bowl. Toss lightly to combine. Serve immediately.
 
FINGERLING POTATOES

Fingerlings are small, stubby, finger-shaped potatoes grown from a variety of heritage potato cultivars. Fingerling varieties grow small and narrow naturally. Fully mature when harvested, they are not new potatoes.

Fingerlings are commonly either halved and roasted as a side dish or used in salads.

Popular fingerling varieties include the yellow-skinned Russian Banana Fingerling, the orange-skinned French Fingerling and the Purple Peruvian Fingerling. They are often sold in bags with the three varieties mixed.

Their small pushcart quickly grew into a thriving business, and soon they opened a store, Chocolatier Petros, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Mary wrote to her brother Petros, Zoë’s grandfather, to come to the U.S. to work in the chocolate business. Petros and his wife worked side by side in the business for many years.

Zoe’s father, George decided to visit her grandfather’s family, and began learning the recipes. He met his wife, Elaini, and the visit turned into a permanent stay.

George, a master chocolatier, has been making the family chocolates ever since—now along with Zoe’s brother, Petros.
Every bite of Zoë’s Chocolate is packed with three generations of love and devotion. But there’s also fun, as you can see in these gourmet Halloween chocolates.

Halloween dudes: skills in white, dark and milk chocolate. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Chocolate Bark: How about a bag of batalicious bark (photo below)? White chocolate is decorated with Halloween’s favorite flying friend ($14).

Chocolate Skulls: Spookalicious skulls are available in dark, milk or white chocolate (photo above, $3.50 each).

Marshmallow Ghosts: Soft and gooey ghostly marshmallows with hints of Tahitian vanilla are perfect for those who don’t like chocolate (yes, there are some folks like that). For a ghoulish trick, watch the ghosts disappear in a cup of hot chocolate ($12.00 for a box of 3).

Petros’ Pumpkin: Hollow dark chocolate pumpkins are filled with chewy sea salt caramels and delicious Drunken Pumpkin chocolate—milk chocolate ganache blended with a silky pumpkin puree and combined with cinnamon, nutmeg, and a hint of Cognac. Classic and beautiful, as well as delicious fun ($18.00).

Head over to ZoesChocolate.com to order yours.

Go batty for white chocolate bark. Photo by
Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

If your idea of chocolate is a box of ganache- and caramel-filled bonbons, look at Zoë’s classic fare.

While we don’t have space to show them here, head over to ZoesChocolates.com to see them for yourself: beautiful bonbons, half of which have Greek accents:

 
Writing this has taken its toll: We must find a piece of chocolate!