A little sweetness and a little danger for October

According to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), early fall started at the autumnal equinox and only lasts through Halloween, so I better give you a crop of early fall recipes!

The first frost can come in early fall. If so, you might need to pick tomatoes while they're still green. Yeah, fried green tomatoes is a common way to use them, but this book offers a different (and far more involved!) preparation. 

The Green Tomato Pie is a mostly-savory preparation, combining the green tomatoes with onions, two full pounds of cheese, and just a touch of brown sugar, all enclosed in a two-crust pie. I'll bet this one would make the onion-lovers happy.

Of course, I need to include something wild, as The Political Palate centers fresh, local ingredients. For early fall, we get a whiff of danger with Pasta con Funghi.

Yes, this is a recipe that starts with a warning. If you don't know what you're doing, this preparation could kill you! And studying mushroom field guides is unlikely to be enough to ensure your safety! So get out there and pick some wild mushrooms! The chance that everyone could wind up dead is an added bonus for the Halloween horror season.

I have to imagine most people who owned this cookbook skipped that recipe (or just made a tomato sauce with boring supermarket mushrooms the Collective may not have approved of). I can't blame them.

Let's get the taste of danger out of our mouths by ending with something sweet: Lime Tart.

I was expecting the typical key-lime-plus-sweetened-condensed-milk preparation, but this one goes a different route and cooks lime juice and rind in a bunch of eggs (with extra yolks), honey, and butter. I can't help but imagine this tasting like lime scrambled eggs... I hope it's better than that, though, especially served the recommended way under a cloud of whipped cream.

Here's hoping your October is better than you imagine it will be, and that the scariest thing you encounter is kids dressed like ninjas or dinosaurs. I'm not a fan of kids, but they are better than deadly mushrooms in your pasta. I guess. Especially if they're dressed like dinosaurs.