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Eddie Huang always knew that when Jeremy Lin hit it big he’d call the player’s sandwich “The Taiwanese Te-Bao.”

The Taiwanese Te-Bao (yum!!)

“I called him the Taiwanese Tebow because I knew he was super Christian,” says Huang, a Taiwanese-Chinese American whose New York restaurant BaoHaus serves the traditional Taiwanese dumplings called bao. He’d been working on the sandwich — a curried pork chop, pickled daikon and carrot, jalapenos and cilantro – since the Knicks brought on Lin in December. “We finally we got it right with this pork chop.”

Huang says he and his friends in the Asian community have been following Lin since Sports Illustrated wrote about him in 2009. “My thing with Jeremy is that it’s such a huge breakthrough for us,” says Huang, who is a lifelong (and therefore long-suffering) Knicks fan. “There are not many of us who are physically dominant. The last one I remember is Bruce Lee. It’s a step in the right direction. We’re not all guys with glasses and pocket protectors.” (Though it’s highly likely that Harvard graduate Lin has a pocket protector stashed somewhere.)

So what happens when Lin cools off? Will the Taiwanese Te-Bao be whisked from the BaoHaus lineup, benched like just another fading player?

“The sandwich is part of the menu,” Huang says passionately, “it’s never coming off.”

It’s a Lin-stitution.

Read more about Lin-spired food and drink in a recent piece I did for Associated Press.

Tenderloin sandwich, the signature 'wich of Indiana

I’m one of those people who would never watch the Superbowl — or any football game for that matter — if food weren’t involved. For big, fun parties like that it’s always a kick to do “themed” items. Since the game is in Indiana, I took a look at the foods the state has to offer. Yes, Wonder Bread figures in there, but also something that was surprisingly yummy: Sugar Cream Pie. It’s not much to look at. Sugar, cream, flour. Sounds kind of bleech, looks kind of pale. But…oh….my….goodness. SO DELICIOUS. Also try the pork tenderloin sandwich. Confession: in my house we ate this like Japanese katsu, with hot, white rice and a sweet, vinegary dipping sauce. Either way, what’s to hate about something fried (don’t answer that.) Enjoy!

Sugar skulls for Mexico's Day of the Dead

Call me old-fashioned, but do we really have to start thinking about Halloween already? I mean, yes it’s October now, but I was finding candy corns and Hershey miniatures right next to my back-to-school supplies. Pretty soon, they’ll be sold with your Fourth of July firecrackers.

But at least the early warning gives you plenty of time to plan. Americans aren’t alone in their fascination with ghoulish confections. Chocolate coffins, sugary bread shaped like bones, and skulls of molded sugar are traditional fare for Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which comes right after Halloween. Sugar skulls are the most famous of the treats, made or purchased by every household and stacked into colorful mounds on street carts. In Britain, London-based baker Lily Jones, aka: Lily Vanilli, churns out cupcakes with coconut-jelly eyeballs and cakes modeled after human heads, saying that the merger of the sublime (the taste) and the grotesque (the design) is just part of being human.

“There’s a fascination with horror,” she told me in an interview last year. “It’s just imagination, something out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of beauty in it too, in the strange and the unusual.”

Recipes for her grotesque cupcakes are collected in her book “A Zombie Ate My Cupcake.”

But for a less ghoulish, more wholesome cupcake, try Martha Stewart, the never-fail go-to for spiffing up basic recipes. She’s got bats and spiders and brains like the rest of them, but somehow there is merely the suggestion of grossness – not an actual pool of fake blood that puts you off your treat. Her Wicked Witch cupcakes are about as far as I want to go.