Pumpkin Passion

Pumpkin Passion, all because, all about, and all consuming blog about pumpkins and pumpkin paraphernalia.

Out of a podcasts, a painfully long commute, and a job that can have its slow days, this blog was created. On my way into work, I was listening to a KCRW podcast of their program “Good Food.” The show is a little creepy in that every episode sounds exactly like the Saturday Night Live skit about the public radio show “Delicious Dish.” I started listening to it because I couldn’t tell if it was a real program or if they were parodying the SNL skit. Surprisingly, it is a “real” program but I can perfectly imagine the host, Evan Kleiman, talking about “Schwetty Balls.”

The topics on this particular program concerned small birds in Mexican Cuisine, food blogs, American drive-in restaurants, Italian winebars, Bobby Flay’s recommended grilling equipment, and the suicide of the French chef, Bernard Louiseau. The segment on food blogging was truly interesting. Evan Kleiman was speaking with Cybele May, the creator of the “Candy Blog.” The blog is simply her reviews on candy primarily found at local grocery or convenience stores. Weeks after listening to the program,I visited the site to locate her blog about the best chocolate covered malt balls. The site is truly beautiful and interesting. Cybele’s photos of the candy she reviews look like they came out of a glossy candy connoisseur’s magazine and the accompanying text is enjoyable to read. Just looking at the site feels like a chocolate covered indulgence. The Candy Blog was really my first exposure to blogging. Afterwards, I became a contributor to a blog started at my work and I found some other interesting blogs from an L.A. Times article.

Then on a particularly boring workday, I showed my coworker the site. She’s a website designer and a computer science major in “real” life. We started discussing blogs and good web design. Eventually we went back to individually searching for something on the internet interesting enough to occupy our minds. Out of nowhere, I opened my mouth and told her “I’m going to start a blog about pumpkins!” She, being as exceedingly bored as me, thought it was a great idea. By the end of the day, www.pumpkinpassion.com was mine and we had chosen the layout and Serendipity as the weblog/blog system.

That explains the blog part but the pumpkin part is a less linear to explain. The Fall season makes me happy. The smells, the weather, the colors, and the food all contribute to Fall being my favorite season. Starting in September and running through November, pumpkin starts appearing in random places in muffins, candy, pasta, pies, lotions, facemasks, perfumes, coffee, soda, and magazine recipes. The difficult part is finding all these goodies before the pumpkin season ends.

I’ve been obsessed with hunting out pumpkin flavored treats for years. It just tastes so damn good, most of the time. Too often, orange food coloring is added and maybe some cinnamon and abracadabra the product gets pumpkin added to its name. Pumpkin is a difficult flavor to capture. It’s not a strong flavor; it’s subtle. Finding the good stuff in the short amount of time it’s available is my purpose in adding one more to the overly bloated universe of blogging.

The photo was taken by jspad for use under a Creative Commons license.