Celebrating Pumpkins!

It's that time of year! With Halloween just around the corner, pumpkin season is officially upon us -- and what a delicious season it is. Pumpkin pies, pumpkin stews, pumpkin lattes, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin soups; this versatile squash spices up just about any dish and evokes this crispness of fall like no other food. So what's the pumpkin all about, anyway?

Pumpkins, like all other squash, are native to North America, though now, of course, they can be found growing happily in many parts of the world, including Australia, where the word "pumpkin" means any variety of winter squash, not just the round, orange-fleshed varieties that we tend to prize over here in Canada. In fact, pumpkins are now so prevalently grown around the world that the only continent without any pumpkins grown on it is Antarctica (for obvious reasons, perhaps)!

In our corner of the world, we tend to use just the flesh of the pumpkin in our cooking, but most parts of this squash are edible, including the seeds, the leaves and even the flowers. In Spanish, pumpkin seeds are called pepitas, a culinary term that's widely used even among English-language chefs.

Pumpkin leaves are a popular green vegetable in parts of Kenya -- they're called seveve and are a main ingredient in the traditional Kikuyu dish mukimo.


This time of year, pumpkins are most recognizable to us in their jack-o'-lantern form -- but did you know that jack-o'-lanterns were originally carved into turnips or beets, which were abundant in Ireland, where the practice as it relates to Halloween is believed to originate. The first carved pumpkin lantern to be called jack-o'-lanterns showed up in the United States in 1834, and were originally associated with the harvest season in general, rather than specifically part of Halloween.



Celebrate pumpkins this week with us by carving your own jack-o'-lantern, stewing up some winter squash, or baking a spooky pie!