Eye of Toad, Ear of Newt

Who doesn’t need a little Witch’s Brew this time of year? Maybe some Ghoul-Ade? Click onto the Halloween section of SOAR, which stands for the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, and you’ll have plenty of munchies to delight your little goblins. The database, developed by an engineering-computer science student at UC Berkeley, lacks the bells and whistles of some recipe Web sites, but it has something else--more than 62,000 recipes. Almost 200 are just for Halloween. We’ll pass, thank you, on the Butchered Snake Bits With Barbecue Sauce (cheese-filled rigatoni) and the Mucous Membrane Milkshake (made with buttermilk; picture it.) But certainly these and the other entries, culled from cookbooks, home cooks and food companies, will appeal to those who enjoy things such as Spit Wad Sandwiches (marshmallows atop peanut butter spread on bread and wadded up).

There are less gross nibbles, such as the Brew (purple grape juice mixed with club soda) and Ghoul-Ade (Kool-Aid and ginger ale). Halloween Party Pops (slices of refrigerated cookie dough, baked with wooden sticks to make suckers) can be frosted any color for the appropriate holiday. But if you really want to get a jump on things, you can click on the Thanksgiving or Christmas categories and start planning. Now that’s scary.

https://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes/holiday/halloween/