Pumpkin🎃Mania!

Are you a fan? I'm mixed. Pumpkin cookies? All in! Pie? Not so much.

“There are three things I've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”

—Linus van Pelt, “The Great Pumpkin”

Let’s face it. It’s almost Halloween and pumpkins 🎃 are everywhere—along with displays of every pumpkin-spice flavored product imaginable. There’s no escape. I admit I’m a bit jaded, though I do have fond memories of carving pumpkins with our son Sam and taking him trick-or-treating many years ago. We dressed in crazy costumes, covered the house with spiders and webs, put the biggest pumpkins we could find on the doorstep and spooky faces in the windows—and bought LOTS of candy to give away, of course.

Polaroid of Jeff, Sam and me many Halloweens ago.

This year my husband Jeff, channeling his inner kid, visited Half Moon Bay in Northern California, the self-described “Pumpkin Capital of the World.” He was on hand to film an episode of his #PhotowalksTV travel show, which included the weigh-in of the year’s heaviest pumpkin. Traveling all the way from Minnesota, the giant fruit (yes, pumpkins are technically fruit!) tipped the scale at 2,560 pounds!

“Gourdzilla,” the monster 2,560-pound prizing-winning pumpkin, began life as a tiny seed in Minnesota. (Photo by Jefferson Graham)

Described in one story as a “Gourdzilla,” it wasn’t even orange—it was kind of beige with hints of pink and green. To me it looked a little flabby and tired, as though it had been force-fed. Of course Travis Gienger, the guy who has been growing the monster squash for the past six-plus months, was plenty happy; he earned $23,040 in prize money, $9 for each pound!

Lately, with our son all grown up and just we two codgers to answer the door on Halloween night, the season triggers a grumpy pumpkin grinch I never knew lived inside me.

“Does EVERYTHING have to have pumpkin in it?” I grumbled. At Trader Joe’s, there must be more than a 100 products on the shelves right now with pumpkin in the name, from pumpkin pancake mix to pumpkin spice coffee to pumpkin pretzels to pumpkin-flavored dog treats! God help you if you don’t like the taste of pumpkin or of pumpkin spice, which, as CBS’s Sunday Morning’s commentator Jim Gaffigan pointed out recently, is mostly cinnamon anyway.

A mere fraction of Trader Joe’s pumpkin-flavored products.

October, “the pumpkin season,” showcases “peak American weirdness,” Gaffigan said. Pumpkins, he groused, are only good for one thing—carving—not eating.

With this I actually disagree. I am quite a fan of pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin soup and, yes, pumpkin ice cream (TJ’s has a delicious variety!).

One thing of which I’ve never been particularly fond is pumpkin pie—I prefer the heft and flavor of sweet potato pie, which I made two years ago for Thanksgiving after reading about it on my friend Patricia Rose’s blog Fresh Food in a Flash. But I may give pumpkin pie another try in time for the upcoming Turkey Day. Seems almost un-American not to like it!

What are your favorite pumpkin recipes—sweet or savory? Are you a fan of pumpkin pie? Or do you prefer other fall flavors, like apple, pear, caramel, maple, walnut, or, like my son Sam in Japan, chestnuts? Please let me know in comments.

Meanwhile, tired of fighting the tide, I decided to make something with the can of pumpkin I’d bought at TJ’s: King Arthur Flour’s Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. Pumpkin and chocolate seem like a perfect pairing to me. Add some toasted walnuts, a little orange zest, and gild the lily (or the pumpkin cookie) with a drizzle of icing and how can you go wrong? For trick-or-treaters leave out the zest and add extra chips or M&M’s for eyes.

Notes:

• The recipe says it makes 5 dozen; I made 53, gave away a bunch and froze the rest. Warmed up a few seconds in the microwave, the cookie softened to a cake-like texture and the chips melted. I’d recommend sprinkling leftovers atop some vanilla or pumpkin ice cream for a special treat!

• Icing and orange zest are strictly optional. If you like the combo of chocolate and orange, add it. The icing is decorative, but the cookies are plenty sweet without it. I may even try reducing the sugar and/or the chips a bit when I make the cookies again.

• If you’re in the market for a slightly healthier pumpkin dessert, check out my recipe for Pumpkin Bread with Toasted Pecans, written some years ago for another blog.

• If you’re looking for something savory, check out my post about Yellow Split Pea and Pumpkin Soup (below) or the myriad online recipes for pumpkin dishes, including these from The Pioneer Woman.

  Soup, Glorious Soup!

Carving a Jack-o’-lantern (Credit: Britannica.com via © kerkezz/Fotolia)

Pumpkins and Halloween: A little history

I’d always taken for granted that pumpkins and Halloween went together like, well, the bunny and Easter. It turns out that the tradition of carving pumpkins goes back to an Irish character called Stingy Jack. According to Britannica.com, after Jack played a trick on the Devil,

“God didn’t allow him into heaven, and the Devil didn’t let him into hell, so Jack was sentenced to roam the earth for eternity. In Ireland, people started to carve demonic faces out of turnips to frighten away Jack’s wandering soul.”

Carved turnips, called “punkies,” were precursors of jack o’lanterns made of pumpkins. (Credit: English-Heritage.org.uk)

Irish immigrants brought the custom to the U.S., replacing turnips with pumpkins, plentiful in the U.S. and easier to carve (and, let’s face it, a more cheerful hue!).

Halloween was based on Samhain, a Celtic festival celebrated in ancient Britain and Ireland marking the end of summer and the beginning of the new year on Nov. 1. On Samhain, the Britannica article explained, “it was believed that…the souls of those who had died that year traveled to the other world and that other souls would return to visit their homes.”

Many Samhain traditions, including carving pumpkins—or turnips—and wearing disguises, were incorporated into Halloween as we know it. English Heritage, another website, offers a primer on how to carve a turnip should you so desire. It’s the same principle as carving a pumpkin, just slicing into a smaller, denser object minus the seeds and slime! Here’s the video:

About that French Toast…

As promised in my last post on Yom Kippur, below is a picture of the Baked Challah French Toast I made for the break-the-fast meal earlier this month, which we celebrated with friends. The dish was quite popular, with most of it disappearing, the best compliment of all!

I think a pumpkin-flavored version would be amazing, either mixing in a few chunks of leftover pumpkin bread (or cookies!) with the challah or adding several spoonfuls of pumpkin purée to the liquid and a sprinkling on some pumpkin spice! I plan to try one of those variations very soon, perhaps with a pumpkin challah! Maybe Trader Joe’s would like to put a boxed version on its shelves in 2023—right next to its 🎃Pumpkin Pancake and Waffle Mix!🥞

Baked Challah French Toast with maple syrup, whipped cream and fruit.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, liking and commenting. Happy baking, cooking, pumpkin- (or turnip-) carving. And may the Great Pumpkin be with you!

Ruth

Linus: "On Halloween night, the Great Pumpkin rises from his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys to all the children."