Compass A&E

Halloween is fast approaching, which means it’s time to forget everything Tom Ford told you about how to look beautiful on Zoom. 

Spooky season is now in full effect, and while many of Halloween’s festivities may be canceled due to the quarantine, we can still carry on the way we have been with everything else this year: on Zoom! 

The arrival of the Pumpkin Spice Latte to the Starbucks menu has become a harbinger of autumn since 2004, when it was first released. 

Now, more than 15 years later, almost every establishment that sells coffee in America has its own pumpkin spice latte recipe that it sells from late September through October. 

As writer Lia Wolgemuth sensibly warns (in the article above), it’s easy to go down a bento box rabbit hole and get too deeply involved with making funny shapes with your children’s snacks and lunchboxes.  

Tucked away in my recipe box are a few yellowed, typewritten pages from my mother-in-law’s home economics class circa 1960. Knowing that I love food, she thought I might like these notes from a unit on garnishes.

We are an indoors people, my family. A walk after a big Thanksgiving dinner was the extent of my childhood experiences outdoors with my parents. But they sent me to summer camp, where I learned to light fires and pitch tents. Raised in a big city, I loved being in the woods. 

For the autumn knitter, there is nothing more magical than yarn — the scent of country as you breathe in fibers like wool or alpaca; the colors: rainbows wherever you look. Fingers itch to touch soft textures.

A show called “Five” and featuring the work of five accomplished female painters from the Tri-state region will be on display at the North Elm Home furnishings shop on Route 22 in Millerton, N.Y., until January. 

Tom Shachtman of Salisbury, Conn., has a new book, “The Memoir of the Minotaur,” which the promotional materials describe as “the posthumous confessions of the half-man, half-bull of Crete, as offered to an audience of recently-deceased, 21st-century fellow souls in Hades’ domain.