Halloween - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

I am sooo happy that Fall is here! What a great time of year! All this new candy, all this cool pumpkin and cinnamon and ginger flavored stuff - yahoo!! I can't wait till the leaves start turning and that crisp feeling is in the air.

But not all fall candy is a winner. Check these out:

Great fall colors, interesting shapes - there's an ear of corn, a bat, a cat, both a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern, a little brown jug, a moon, and some wheat. These would be great on a Thanksgiving cake or to toss around the center of a table.

Now get this - yellow tastes a little like BANANA (not really what I'm looking for for fall), dark brown tastes a little like chocolate (but nowhere near as good as Tootsie Roll - not even close - kind of gross), the light brown was my favorite (tastes like maple). I don't know what flavor the orange ones are - not orange - and not bad. But mysterious. These are all VERY sweet - pretty much all sugar. The good news is that they have zero fat and 6 of them have only 130 calories.

They get even more interesting. I bought two bags (they looked better than they are) and half of them looked like this:

Okay - it's probably just sugar, but it looks gross. This kind of messes up the whole - use them for decorations idea. But hey - they are cheap - if you had to pitch some of them it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Good for decoration (gotta love all those crazy shapes - I mean, a little brown jug? Who woulda thought!), not so great to eat. About ten million times better - Brach's Maple Nut Goodies and/or Tootsie Rolls.

I reviewed these last year and I'm just mentioning them again in case you guys forgot:

I bought these Pumpkin Spice Kisses at Target and was surprised at just how damn good they are. They were even better than I remembered! Now you will see there is no chocolate here. But I figure if Hershey's can make Kisses with no chocolate, I can review Kisses with no chocolate. : ) These are all about the pumpkin and the spices and they are so creamy and so good - WOW! A+++ There is even a recipe for Pumpkin Spice Swirl Cheesecake Pie on the wrapper (Holy God).

This is a clever update from Reese's:

It's a bag of their miniatures, but with half milk chocolate and half the new dark chocolate. I love the orange and black foil wrappers - VERY festive! These look terrific in a bowl on your fall table.

What can I say? Reese's Miniatures never let me down. The perfect bite size peanut butter and chocolate combo. But I have to confess - I still like the milk chocolate best.

Now here's something you probably haven't heard of - spiced pumpkin seed brittle. I tried to buy this at Williams-Sonoma last year, but they were sold out. I wasn't about to miss out this year:

Okay - I know it's kind of ugly. But man, it tastes GREAT!!! It's made by Anette's Chocolates in Napa Valley.

https://anettes.securesites.com/shop.html?Category=Beer%20Brittles%20plus...

It's about half the price I paid on their website, so you might want to go there first, although I didn't see this exact brittle. I really like peanut brittle, and you know how I feel about pumpkin, so I thought this might be good. Oh yeah - I can see why it sells out every year. YUM!! Try it before it's gone!

So, what do we have?

The ever popular - don't judge a candy by its appearance. Brach's looked great - awesome shapes and colors, but it was pretty bad. The spiced pumpkin seed brittle looks pretty ugly, but it is excellent. Unfortunately we too often think that the attractive person is better than the unattractive one, and we are so very often wrong. I'd like to give a shout out to O.J., Ted Bundy, and Britney Spears.

In our constant search for the new, the novel, the different, we sometimes forget the tried and true. It's pretty damn hard to beat a Reese's. You all know I love the new as mush as anyone, but I think we often overlook what we already have in search of the next new thing. Look how many marriages end in divorce, how much stuff we buy when we already have perfectly good stuff, etc. etc. etc. We take the old stuff (which often is the best stuff) for granted.

And finally - celebrate the season!! All this stuff won't be around forever. (And neither will we.)