7/31/09 Pumpkins!

Ask anyone who knows me - I love pumpkins.

I like carving jack'o'lanterns, visiting pumpkin patches, and I **LOVE** cooking with pumpkins. In the US, I was never quite brave enough to cook the actual gourd, and stuck to canned pumpkin. Here in Morocco, I've been forced out of that comfort zone, and have been delighted with the results.

In both countries, I baked pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pies, plus I even made a pumpkin-and-shrimp-soup once in the US (land of readily available seafood, unlike my mountain village).

Pumpkins make me happy.

So I was *delighted* to see them appear in today's souq.

Even more delightful: they're orange!

Every pumpkin I noticed last year was green on the outside, but satisfyingly orange on the inside. But these are orange inside *and* out.

Hooray for pumpkin season!!

(Oh, and yes, in the US, pumpkin season is mid-October through late November, when the air is crispy-cool and the leaves crunch underfoot. But last year, I made the mistake of not buying any sweet potatoes when I saw them - I think it was in September? - and waiting till Thanksgiving...by which time sweet potatoes were out of season and completely unavailable, to my great disappointment. So I'm accepting that a "season" is from whenever a fruit or veggie appears in souq until it disappears, regardless of what the weather is like. Right now, it's over 90 here in my mountain aerie, and well over 120 in most of the lowlands...but if there are pumpkins, well then by golly it's PUMPKIN TIME!!!!!!!!!)