Only 13 more cooking days until Thanksgiving

Hey, internet! I'm getting all excited that Thanksgiving is coming.

You know, I never used to be particularly enthusiastic about Thanksgiving, but then, about four years ago, we took over cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my husband's family. And we'd do it in New Hampshire, where I could never remember where I left the tablecloths, or whether I had any candles, or where we keep the carving knife and fork. And then a major appliance would fail just when it was needed most, and that would screw things up so badly that I'd start to feel kind of weird and goofy, as if I'd been teleported into an episode of I Love Lucy.

But we'd have a great time, anyway.

Now, this year, we doing Thanksgiving again, and we're not going to New Hampshire, which means that the time I usually spend waiting to go through airport security can now be spent digging out the turkey shaped gravy boat. And putting new Thanksgiving-y colored candles into the freshly-polished candlesticks. Stuff like that.

So call me mental, but I'm going to begin the travel-free, slow-food Thanksgiving celebration by cooking a bunch of pumpkins. Because I still have eight pie pumpkins leftover from the Girl Scouts pumpkin-carving meeting. Isn't that all green and thrifty and recycle-y of me?

I don't know how much puree I'm going to end up with, but definitely enough for a couple of pumpkin pies. I'm also thinking of forcing my husband to make pumpkin ravioli with sage butter. If he balks, I'll remind him that our brother-in-law is a vegetarian.

I'd also considering the possibility of trying a new recipe I found in this week's New York Times food section. It's for pumpkin cake with chocolate chips. I know--weird, right? I can't wrap my brain around the idea at all. I'm probing at the concept with my mental taste buds, but seriously, the combination simply will not compute. My brain is de-evolving even as I type. It's saying something like this:

PUMPKIN + CHOCOLATE != GOOD | > /dev/null.

And yet, somehow, I am still fascinated.

But maybe I should just stick to the classic pumpkin pie.

So what about you, Internet? Are you happy that Halloween is over, yet the long National Nightmare that is the Christmas Shopping Season is not yet upon us? Are you, too, getting psyched for turkey day?