looking forward: Sunday Puzzle 2015-10-11

Welcome to Sunday Puzzle, a weekly series for people who enjoy mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, odd bits of trivia, and the occasional furry animal.

Julie Waters started the Sunday Puzzle series in October 2007, and a special kind of acrostic puzzle (named JulieCrostics in her honor) quickly became the Sunday Puzzle feature item. Some of those early puzzles are real gems!

For the past 2 months I've been re-running some of those early puzzles. But tonight I'm back to posting new puzzles. And since it's October, I thought I'd use tonight's puzzle to spotlight the upcoming trick-or-treat occasion I'm sure you're all looking forward to as much as I am.

But first: one of the puzzles from last week's potluck went unsolved, so I'm reposting that tonight so folks can continue pondering it.

Here's an interesting puzzle which was posted on another site. The person posting it had been given pages torn out of a puzzle book, including the page with this puzzle -- but not the answer pages. We managed to solve it over there (and to identify the book the pages were torn from, contact the author, and get confirmation of the solution). I'm curious how folks here will do with this one.

Basically, the page contains a list of 13 words. Some appear toward the left side of the page, some appear toward the right, and the words are in a variety of colors. It is not clear from the look of the page whether the placement and coloring are relevant to the solution or simply a way to fill up space on the page and make it more visually interesting (and I'm not going to tell you which it is, so you'll have to determine that for yourselves).

The text which appears at the top of the page reads:

Here are a number of different words which, as anyone can clearly see, are all to do with food and culinary instruments. What is the more lateral connection between these words?

Hmmm. Not that easy, is it? Well, while you're thinking about what the connection between those 13 words could be, perhaps you'd like to hop over the passed-out Boehner and tackle tonight's JulieCrostic.