Punkin'

I don't know if I can chalk it up to pregnancy cravings, or to my annual obsession with fall foods, or to the awareness that next year we may again be without easy access to pumpkin-flavored goodies, but I have been on a pumpkin streak over this past week or so. It helped that we ate out and cooked a lot, in the name of giving my parents-in-law a taste of a broad variety of American foods (items they had never eaten before this week: quesadillas, French toast, breakfast sausage, grits, portobello mushrooms, pecan pie, zucchini bread, dill pickles, jumbalaya, bagels, fudge, grilled cheese sandwiches, and yes, pumpkin-flavored things, with the exception of the pumpkin desserts I made last year for Thanksgiving).

The list of pumpkin foods I have eaten over the past week alone:

pumpkin cream cheese muffins
pumpkin spice doughnuts
pickled pumpkin salad with crunchy pumpkin seeds
spicy pumpkin soup
pumpkin cheesecake
pumpkin bagels with pumpkin cream cheese
pumpkin pie fudge
pumpkin ice cream (two versions)
pumpkin gnocchi with sage brown butter sauce (which I made from scratch!)
pumpkin bread pudding (this is the most delicious and easy dessert ever: it impressed my guests and I'm considering making another pan of it just for myself)

When everybody began to notice my penchant for nabbing any pumpkin item from every menu and making as much pumpkiny food as possible, they started to joke that we should name the baby (oh! the name debates! they are raging) Pumpkin, or Carabasseta (little pumpkin, in Catalan). It's not half bad, at least as a placeholder until we have a permanent name. Our little pumpkin baby, round and chubby and scrumptious.