Nutmeg

The longer you can let this chicken rest in the marinade (up to 24 hours), the better the warm, aromatic, fiery spices will penetrate the meat.

These simple spring hand-pies are packed to the brim with tangy sweetened rhubarb. Pack them along, cooled, for a picnic or serve them warm with equally tangy buttermilk-lemon granita.

Also known as advieh, this aromatic blend comes from Persian cuisine. It’s fragrant, a little sweet, and gently warming. It is delicious mixed with sugar and sprinkled over baked goods, donuts, and rice pudding or added to dried fruits that are cooking into jam. It straddles the sweet and savory world because it’s also great for flavoring rice pilaf with toasted nuts, lentil soup, lamb meatballs, braised chicken, or vegetable stew. It’s a blend that is shared by chefs and pastry chefs. Use it to make Persian-Style Carrots and Black-Eyed Peas.

Speculoos cookies in "butter" form add a spicy complexity to pumpkin purée for a new spin on the classic fall dessert.

Can’t get enough of pumpkin pie spice? With this easy whipped cream, you can add it to everything: our awesome Build-Your-Own Thanksgiving Pie Bar, the ultimate autumn icebox cake, and, yes, even your next latte.

Every October as kids, we loved to go pumpkin picking and buy fresh pumpkins. Our grandmother would take the pumpkin flesh and bake it in the oven with a little cinnamon and sugar, and then we’d stick it in the blender, puree it, and use it for baking. We’d bake pumpkin bread, pumpkin cake, and pumpkin pie, and we would also roast the pumpkin seeds in the oven. Really, she used every single part of that pumpkin! The thing we loved the most was our grandmother’s pumpkin cake. It was more of a cake-bread hybrid: very dense and savory yet sweet. It smelled amazing coming out of the oven. We would sometimes just eat it without any icing, hot from the oven. We’d burn our tongues because we wouldn’t even wait for it to cool!

Anybody who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for cupcakes and soy chai lattes, so combining these two creates my own piece of heaven. These cupcakes are moist, tender, and lightly spicy, thanks to the combination of ginger and cardamom. Go ahead and pair with a steaming hot chai latte...you won’t overdo it.

Bubbling cheeses and tender spinach elevate store-bought gnocchi (look for it in the dried-pasta section).

This aromatic alternative to pumpkin pie calls for fresh (not canned!) squash and a new twist on the classic crumble topping. If you'd like some sparkle on the edge of your crust, brush it with a beaten egg and sprinkle with coarse sugar before baking.

Everyone loves a Bundt, and a sweet-potato version drizzled with coffee-chocolate sauce is hard to beat.

Perfect for the fall, this Pumpkin Spice Latte will warm you up inside. Try this CARNATION BREAKFAST ESSENTIALS® reader-submitted recipe today!

June 24 is the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, the traditional day to harvest green walnuts for making nocino, a delicious liqueur invented at a congress of witches, according to Anna Tasca Lanza, the doyenne of Sicilian cooking. Lanza's witches were Italian, but other countries from Croatia to France to the chilly Teutonic regions equally claim greenwalnut liqueur as their own. I learned to make it at the Institute of Domestic Technology, a cooking school in Altadena, California, where I also teach. When you harvest the nuts—working barefoot, according to some folklore—they are smaller than eggs, smooth to the touch, and crisp like apples, because the shells have not yet hardened. The nutmeats, at this stage, are jelly. Like most liqueurs, nocino is easy but requires patience. You slice the nuts and cover them with strong booze, sugar, and spice, and allow the mixture to infuse for forty days, until it is nearly black. The real test of patience begins after you bottle it. Ten-year-old nocino is said to be the best, and certainly you would never drink this summer's batch before cold weather sets in this fall. Mature nocino has a complex flavor of nutmeg, allspice, coffee, and caramel. Drink it neat as a digestif, or use it to flavor desserts. A few tablespoons of nocino lightly whisked into a cup of heavy cream will cause it to seize, as if magically transformed into cooked custard. The thickened cream is called "posset," and can be used as a sauce alongside cakes or other desserts. My nocino recipe is based on those from the Institute of Domestic Technology and Lanza's Sicilian cookbook The Garden of Endangered Fruit. Its fundamentals are green walnuts, 80-proof grain spirits, and sugar. (My secret ingredient is coffee beans.) You can change the aromatics if you like, but use small quantities, because the spices can take over. Green walnuts are sometimes available at farmers' markets, or can be ordered online at www.localharvest.org.