[1] Cahill’s Farm Cheddars get our vote for best-looking Irish cheese. Photo courtesy iGourmet.com.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to cook up traditional Irish dishes, set out an Irish cheese board and some Irish beers.

You’ll have to hunt for the cheeses (or you can buy them online).

 
Serve the cheeses as a munch with apéritifs, beer, cocktails or wine; as a cheese course; or as a dessert course with fruit.

Or, snack on Irish cheese and beer as you watch Celtic Thunder, Celtic Woman or your own Irish film festival (start with The Secret Of Kells).

The most memorable is Zombie Cupcakes: From the Grave to the Table with 16 Cupcake Corpses, by Zilly Rosen, a professional cake designer based in Buffalo, New York.

Cooked up in Dr. Rosen-Frankenstein’s lab, the cookbook introduces you to a ghoulish (but delicious!) army of creatures of the night—or their various body parts. (We love the hand reaching up through the “earth” frosting, Carrie-style.)

Each recipe has a color photo of a stunning zombie-inspired design. In addition to the undead, concepts include crows tearing up the icing to reveal “blood” underneath, and a graveyard with rats. The photos make us want to start a zombie cupcake bakery and turn out these delights every day.

But even if we never bake a thing, we like Zombie Cupcakes as a fantasy picture book that makes us smile. Ms. Rosen: How are you going to top this?

Beyond us grown-ups, we think the book represents a great opportunity to teach kids and teens the joy of baking.

This cupcake is called “On The Loose.”
Photo © Ivy Press 2010. Styling by James Lawrence.

 
Anyone can get a box of cake mix and a can of stuffing to produce ordinary cupcakes. With Zombie Cupcakes, you can work your way up to being a cupcake star.

Fondant is the key. Fondant is a smooth paste made of sugar, glycerine and cornstarch. It is rolled like dough to a 1/8″ – 1/16″ thickness and then draped over a cake instead of a traditional frosting. It can be flavored. To decorate, shapes can be molded, then colored, and painted. Think of it as edible Play-Doh or modeling clay.

Fondant also seals in moistness, enabling cakes and cupcakes to stay fresher longer than with conventional types of frosting. That’s why it’s so often used on wedding cakes, which can take a couple of days to build and decorate.

If you’ve seen cakes that look like handbags, wrapped gift boxes, race cars, etc.: that’s fondant (check out these fondant-covered cakes from Elegant Cheesecakes).

You don’t have to make fondant from scratch: It can be purchased at a baking supply store. Having said that, we must underscore that fresh, homemade fondant tends to taste better—like marshmallow.

 
Watch out: We’ll be back for Halloween with the crows and the graveyard.

The ad encourages a switch to water, sparkling water and tea. While you can’t go wrong with water, tea is packed with antioxidants—specifically, catechins, which make up some 25% of the dry weight of a fresh tea leaf.

What if you don’t like unsweetened tea?

The one or two teaspoons of sugar you’d add to a cup of tea are a better choice than the 10 teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke or apple juice, or the 8 teaspoons of sugar in a can of orange juice.*

*Sugar levels can vary in different brands of fruit juice.

But first, try some really, really good tea, purchased loose in a tea shop or bottled by a premier company. Top-quality tea is so flavorful that no sugar or milk is needed.

Huge flavor, no calories. Photo by Naheed
Choudhry | THE NIBBLE.

We used to drink a bottle of Green Jasmine, Lemongrass Green and Rose Green daily. In the name of green living, we subsequently bought the loose tea and started to brew our own, carrying it around in a water bottle. Now, we can’t live without it, preferring iced tea to water.

If those catechins don’t deliver us to a ripe old age, we’ll have still enjoyed great refreshment.

• Find more of our favorite teas.

[1] A glass of Sauvignon Blanc wine with a side of feta and olives (photo © Vermont Creamery).

[2] A Greek salad with Rose wine (photo © Loes Klinker | Unsplash).

[3] Try any of the wines with a spinach and feta flatbread or pizza. Here’s the recipe (photo © King Arthur Flour).

[4] Want to try Greek wines? Look for the Boutari label (photo © Boutari Wineery).

Feta is Greece’s most famous cheese: a pure white, aged curd cheese that crumbles easily.

While the cheese has been made since antiquity, the name came into the Greek language in the 17th century, from the Italian word fetta, meaning slice.

The name refers to slicing the cheese from the brick.

Authentic feta is a sheep’s milk cheese, or a mixture of sheep’s and goat’s milks.

Outside of the EU, where the recipe is protected by law, it can also be made of cow’s milk.

Feta is formed into bricks and salted and cured for several months in a brine solution.

The cheese is semi-hard, with a flavor that can range from mild and milky to salty with a very tangy acidity.

Watch out: Cheaper brands of feta can be inedibly salty.

If you purchase a brand that turns out to be too salty, soaked the cheese in water or milk to remove some of the saltiness.

If your experience with feta cheese is limited to Greek salads or a pita pocket, branch out: There are many ways to enjoy this tangy cheese.

As we were looking at recipes* on the website of Nikos brand feta, we were inspired by the suggested wine pairings.
 
 
FETA CHEESE & WINE PAIRINGS

Of course, the logical place to look for wine pairings is the Greek wine section. But many stores don’t carry them, and most Americans don’t know about them.

So Nikos recommends pairings with familiar wines, that enhance the flavor of feta. If you’re searching for Greek wines, try the Boutari wines.

 
 
FETA RECIPES

 
 
>>> THE HISTORY OF FETA CHEESE <<<
 
 
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*Feta and Roasted Eggplant Terrine, Feta Cheese Beggars Pouches, Feta Cheese with White Bean Hummus and more.

Last year, a media blitz let America know that trans fat was bad for us. Some cities legislated that it could not be used in restaurants. Manufacturers reformulated their products and declared “No Trans Fats!” on the packaging.

Trans fats are no longer the enemy.

Know what is? Saturated fat!

Knowing which fats raise LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) and which ones don’t is the first step in lowering your risk of heart disease—America’s number one killer. You can’t wait until you’re 50 to change your diet. Your healthy future starts today.

Saturated fat is the main dietary cause of high blood cholesterol. It is found mostly in foods from animals, plus some plants.

And darn it, saturated fat is found in America’s favorite foods: beef, lamb, pork, poultry, veal and their fats (chicken fat and lard, e.g.), for starters.

 
The American Heart Association strongly advises these fat guidelines for healthy Americans over age 2:*

 
If your calorie goal is 2,000 calories each day (recommended for sedentary females 21-50), that means no more than 16 g saturated fat and between 50 and 70 grams of total fat each day, with most fats coming from sources of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.

It isn’t easy to cut back on that delicious saturated fat. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single teaspoon.
 
BEYOND SATURATED FATS:

WHICH FATS & OILS ARE HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY.
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*Conventional thinking, currently being studied by researchers, is that infants need relatively large amounts of fat, including saturated fat, for proper growth and development.