No plans for Halloween? You can still invite the gang for a Halloween cocktail party with these special cocktails:

There’s still time to invite friends to a Halloween cocktail party—costumes optional. Create your cocktail menu from these cocktail recipes:

 
 
NEXT STEPS

1. SEND out the invite. Costumes optional?

2. DEVELOP the menu: 4 or 5 cocktail options, plus a mocktail and soft drinks for the designated drivers.

3. CHOOSE some recipes that can be made in advance, and make multiple quantities in pitchers.
 
 
HALLOWEEN MOCKTAIL

The easiest: a mix of apple cider, pomegranate juice, and club soda, with an optional candy pumpkin, notched to fit on the glass rim, or a lime wheel.

Mix the juices in a pitcher, and add club soda to the glass after pouring. Vary the proportions as you prefer, starting with a 2:1 or 3:1 proportion of juice to soda.

Alternatively, there are hundreds of Halloween cocktail recipes online.
 
 
 
 

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[1] Vampire Martini. Here’s the recipe (photo © Betty Crocker).

[2] Bloody Eyeball Martini. Here’s the recipe (photo © Kris Plazek | What To Drink).

[3] Black Magic Screwdriver. Here’s the recipe (photo © Elegant Affairs Caterers).

[1] Try baked eggs in bell pepper halves (photo courtesy Foodie Crush | Go Bold With Butter). [2] Eggs Benedict on a croissant instead of the classic English Muffin (photo courtesy Peach Valley Cafe). [3] A fried egg sandwich, elevated with a whole grain seeded roll (photo courtesy National Pasteurized Eggs).

World Egg Day is October 21st.

Most of us have grown up with the incredible, edible egg; and we are egg-static to celebrate this little protein powerhouse.

With over 6 grams of high-quality protein, nine essential amino acids and only 70 calories, , it’s one of the least egg-spensive sources of high-quality protein per serving.

It’s a staple food as well as an indulgence (caramel custard, French ice cream, hollandaise sauce, mousse…).

20 RECIPES TO CONSIDER FOR TODAY

Options from breakfast, lunch and dinner through dessert.
 
Breakfast & Brunch Eggs

 
Brunch, Lunch & Dinner Eggs

 
Egg Cetera

 
Next, a recipe that is new to us: Huevos Divorciados, a Mexican breakfast dish that means “divorced eggs.” (We’ve also made it for lunch and a light dinner.)

Sunnyside-up fried eggs are dressed up in different ways and separated on the plate, “each going its own way” (photo #4, below).

The typical direction uses two different salsas: a spicy red salsa for one egg and a cooling tomatillo (green) salsa with the other. The salsa and eggs are set upon two crispy corn tortillas.

But you can use different salsas, toppings and underpinnings, and come up with your signature style.

We adapted this recipe from one by Chef Jeffrey Clark for Davidson’s Eggs.

RECIPE: HUEVOS DIVORCIADOS

As is our won’t at THE NIBBLE, we like to push the boundaries of the original dish and find fun ways to customize it. For Huevos Divorciados, you can separate the two eggs and their different salsas with:

 
Preparation

1. BRUSH both sides of the tortillas with olive oil. Place in baking pan and bake at 400°F for 6 minutes or until crisp. Meanwhile…

2. PREPARE the sunny side-up eggs. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium-low heat until melted. Gently slide 2 eggs into the skillet. Cook 1 to 2 minutes or until the whites are set and opaque, and the yolks begin to firm. Gently remove from skillet; repeat with the remaining butter and eggs.

3. PLACE two tortillas side by side on dinner plates. Place one egg on each tortilla. On each plate, ladle 6 tablespoons of the red salsa around one egg and 6 tablespoons of the salsa verde around the second egg.

4. SPRINKLE eggs with equal amounts of cheese and cilantro. Garnish with onion slices, a lime wedge and guacamole. Serve with breakfast potatoes, refried beans, or black beans, if desired.
 
CHECK OUT OUR EGG GLOSSARY

It’s a view of the different types of eggs, from blue hen eggs to ostrich eggs.

How many of these types have you had?
 
EGG ETYMOLOGY
The French have the ouef, the Italians and Spanish have uovo and ovo from the Latin ovum. The Greeks have oon, the Germans have Ei.

How did we get egg?

Egge appeared in the the mid-14th century northern England dialect, derived mostly from Old Norse and Proto-Germanic ajja, possibly derived from root awi, bird.

[4] Huevos Divorciados from OiYouFood. Here’s the recipe. [5] It’s easy to make egg drop soup at home with this recipe (photo courtesy Good Eggs).

[1] Caramel apple dip (photo courtesy Eat Wisconsin Cheese). [2] Rainbow baby carrots (photo Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE).

If you’ll be home on Halloween—either dispensing candy or hunkering down—you need a Halloween treat that isn’t candy.

Thanks to our friends at EatWisconsinCheese.com for this recipe.

It’s easy to make with purchased caramel sauce (or if you’re hard core, your homemade sauce).

The caramel dip is a bit indulgent, but you can:

 
RECIPE: CARAMEL APPLE DIP

You can use this as a dip or a spread, a snack or a dessert.

Ingredients For 8 Servings

 
Dippers

 
Preparation

1. BEAT the heavy cream in a medium bowl with an electric mixer, until stiff peaks begin to form (about 2-3 minutes).

2. ADD the apple pie spice, vanilla extract, salt and caramel sauce. Mix until combined, scraping the sides of the bowl to ensure even mixing.

3. ADD the cream cheese and mix until just incorporated. Add the diced apple and mix until evenly combined. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour. Serve with fruit and/or graham crackers, gingersnaps or other cookies. When ready to serve…

4. TOSS the diced apple in lemon juice to prevent browning. Here are other ways to prevent browning.
  

In prior Halloweens we’ve suggested Eyeball Jell-O, Eyeball Ice Cream, radish eyeballs for crudites and garnish, deviled egg eyeballs.

If your specialty produce purveyor has imported them from Australia, where they’re now in season, fresh lychees (photo #2) make the best eyeball food: nothing to do but peel and eat them.

RECIPE: BROWNIE EYEBALLS

You can eat these as a snack, or use them as cupcake or ice cream toppers.

Prep time is 45 minutes, chill time is 30 minutes.

Ingredients For 16 Eyeballs

 
Preparation

1. PREPARE the brownies according to package directions. Bake just until just done

2. TRIM the crisp edges from the brownie while warm; eat them as you wish. Crumble the remaining warm brownie into a medium mixing bowl.

3. ADD the Craisins to the warm crumbled brownies and combine until a thick dough-like mixture forms. Shape the dough into 1-inch balls, pressing firmly.

4. DIP the balls into the melted chocolate, letting the excess drip off. Place on waxed paper-lined baking sheets. Refrigerate for 1 hour or until the chocolate is firm.

[1] Brownie eyeballs for Halloween (photo courtesy Ocean Spray). [2] Fresh lychees, nature’s “eyeballs” (photo courtesy Livestrong).

CHOCOLATE MELTING TIPS

[2] A freshly-dripped carafe of coffee (photo courtesy ZeteDesign.Wordpress.com).

[3] The latest Chemex design, which adds a handle for easier pouring, was actually one of the original designs before the streamlined design was chosen. It’s $43.50 at Williams-Sonoma.

You can, it’s easy, and a lot less expensive than the pour-over, which took four passes from the barista.

In fact, in our youth…
…there were no specialty coffee bars (your take-out choice was Dunkin Donuts or a deli or diner),
…coffee at home was limited to a percolator or instant coffee, and
…people chose either Folgers or Maxwell House, but
…coffee aficionados made their coffee in a Chemex carafe with their favorite ground beans, usually from the supermarket although the real connoisseurs got mail-order beans from specialty shops.

If they were lucky, they lived in a town with a specialty coffee and tea shop, with loose beans and packaged coffee from around the world.

We were lucky: We lived in New York City, which had McNulty’s Tea & Coffee, established in 1895 and still located at 109 Christopher Street in the West Village (and still not open on Sundays).

A visit to McNulty’s was a trip back to another age. Today, the journey is accented with modern coffee makers and gadgets that didn’t exist at the time.

But the aroma is still the same: an exotic mingling of the many aromas of coffees and teas from around the world, kept in large glass canisters. There were burlap sacks of beans and chests of tea with stenciled markings from far away lands. The brass scale was also from the 19th century.

Amid the tea and coffee was one ultra-modern brewing apparatus: the Chemex drip coffee maker.
 
 
THE HISTORY OF POUR-OVER (DRIP) COFFEE

Pour over, also called manual drip brewing or the drip method, is a fashionable new term for an old, low-tech method of coffee brewing.

Ground coffee is added to a ceramic or plastic cone that sits in a paper filter atop a glass carafe, ceramic pot, coffee cup or another receptacle. The Chemex system eliminates the need for a cone by creating a carafe with a narrow neck that holds the filter.
 
Melitta, The First Pour-Over

The pour-over technique was invented by a German housewife, Melitta Benz, in 1908. Displeased with the grittiness and murkiness of coffee as it was then prepared, she devised a paper filter from a sheet of her son’s notebook paper, and set the filter into a brass cup into which she punched holes for the coffee to drip through.

The commercial version was made in ceramic (today available in ceramic or plastic). As anyone who has used a Melitta drip brewer knows, it became a great success for its superior brew.

Fast-forward a few decades, to inventor Peter Schlumbohm, a Ph.D. chemist who had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany. He developed and sold his patents focused on heating and cooling systems, the thermos bottle, and dry ice manufacturing among them.

In 1941, he released the Chemex drip coffee system with the coffee filter placed in a glass carafe.

Like the Melitta, the filter was filled with ground coffee and hot water, which drip-drip-dripped into the carafe.

Its Bauhaus style design, elegant in thermal glass from Corning, received a big endorsement from the design community and was featured on the cover of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Useful Objects in Wartime” bulletin, making it “the official poster-child of [the] new emphasis on undecorated, functional simplicity [source]. It is included in the design collection of the Museum.

The Next Revolution In Home Coffee Brewing

In 1971, the first electric drip coffee maker to hit the consumer market, Mr. Coffee, revolutionized how many Americans brewed their coffee. Adios, percolator; bienvenidos, Mr. Coffee.

Mr. Coffee engendered shelves full of electric drip brands, which remained paramount until the Keurig single-serve beverage brewing system and the proliferation of K-Cup options took hold. In 2002, some 10,000 units were sold to offices, replacing the Bunn system and the need to clean the coffee pots and drink coffee that had been sitting on the burner for too long.

Consumers loved the Keurig system, and by 2006, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters had acquired a stake and signed up leading coffee brands for the K-Cups.

Gosh, has it only been ten years?
 
THE RETURN OF POUR-OVER

While the Melitta, Chemex, and other pour-over apparatuses remained a niche product, our first experience with the modern pour-over took place in 2006 in San Francisco, where the line of customers stretched around the block to get a cup from Blue Bottle Coffee.

As our job is to know what’s new and wonderful in the world of food and drink, we waited for some 25 minutes. Sure, it was a good cup of coffee, but we didn’t do it again.

And we didn’t have to: The trend proliferated, and soon there was enough drip coffee in our own neighborhood to eliminate the line wait.

This brings us to the present: pour-overs at home.

You can still buy a Melitta, and an improvement on it, the Pour-Over Coffee Maker with Water Tank Good Grips.

The water stays hot in the mini-tank instead of in an open filter. All you need is to add ground coffee and hot water—no paper filter.

The set (photo at right) is just $15.99 at Oxo.com
 
Drip Tips
Drip coffee requires a particular technique to ensure that your brew is as good as Blue Bottle’s.

Here are Blue Bottle’s drip coffee-making tips.

[5] The modern Melitta system is $29.99 at Bed Bath & Beyond. You can also buy a $3.99 plastic cone to brew a cup atop your own cup or mug.

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