October: The month of chocolate cakes full of veggies

According to Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978), "October is a colorful, spirited month. Vivid blue skies are overhead and sure rays of clear sunshine warm our shoulders. The changing leaves dance in the trees and then drift slowly down to form a multi-colored carpet for our walking pleasure."

In October, I'm more focused on admiring the Halloween decorations than the leaves, but then again, 12-foot-tall skeletons and giant inflatable ghosts, black cats, and spiders were not easy to come by in 1978. I guess they had to take their thrills where they could, so it was the fall leaves.

October is designated as the month for "ethnic" foods, so this chapter features Italian Meatballs and Sauce Heroes.

I think a lot of today's home cooks would consider themselves relatively accomplished if they made meatball sandwiches at home using frozen meatballs and jarred tomato sauce. Spending hours making the ingredients could be a fun way to spend a chilly weekend, though, especially back before people got sucked into doomscrolling.

A lot of October focuses on something we still associate with October: sweets! Granted, none of these would work for trick-or-treating, but still... Sugar!

The book suggests Chocolate Surprise Squares in the "Cooking for the Fair" section. Our county fair was the end of August when I was a kid-- not anytime in October!-- but I definitely remember seeing this recipe well-represented in our baking competitions.

Its popularity was mostly because our fairgrounds were within smelling distance of a sauerkraut factory, and they would sponsor special prizes for dishes with sauerkraut in them. I'm not sure what everybody else's excuse for making chocolate sauerkraut cake was. 

The vegetable of the month-- potatoes-- gets featured in recipes both savory and sweet. The sweet potato isn't the only tuber that gets in on the dessert action. 

Yep! The Chocolate Potato Torte is made with plain old white potatoes sent through a ricer.

The section of the October chapter that puzzled me the most, though, was the section labeled "Halloween Treats." You might expect treats with spooky shapes, like jack-o-lanterns made with oranges or orange peppers. You might expect homemade candies or popcorn balls, given that this was the very end of the era when homemade treats might be considered acceptable for trick-or-treaters. What you would not expect, though, is something like this:

I have zero clue what makes Surfer Shake Halloween-appropriate. It's just a weird hybrid of an indulgent thick ice-creamy milkshake and a weird "nutrition" shake the health-food set would try to choke down. (Okay, now that I think about it, maybe a mixture of raw eggs, wheat germ, vegetable oil, and vanilla ice cream is pretty scary...) And this recipe isn't an anomaly in a mostly-spooky collection. The entire section just seems like it's random recipes Hansen wanted to throw in somewhere and couldn't find the right spot, so she just said, "Let's claim it's a Halloween treat!" and called it a day. 

Here's hoping your October is as cozy as an Italian Meatball and Sauce Hero and far spookier than a Surfer Shake! (And that your chocolate won't be full of surprise vegetables.)