Pumpkin... everything

We have less than two and a half months before we leave.  One of the most obnoxious things about moving, from a logistical standpoint, is trying to get all of your food eaten before you leave.  Couple that with a one-month lag between ordering food online, and it gets even trickier.  Do I bother trying to order more gluten or just deal with lower-quality bread for the next two and half months?  After all, by the time I get it (around Christmas) how much baking am I going to do anyway?  On the other hand, pizza crust is a lot better with gluten....

Then throw in a consumables shipment where I had to decide what I would use over our entire tour based on some imagined number I conjured up in my pregnancy-addled brain two years ago.

This is how we're run out of black beans and tahina but have plenty of popcorn, powdered sugar, and chicken stock.  Bad planning.

Back when I was stocking up around Halloween 2011 I decided that we needed a lot of canned pumpkin because when you really want pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin pie, you really can't use anything but pumpkin.

Last year I think I used one can, for Thanksgiving dinner, which left us with about fourteen cans of pumpkin sitting in our consumables closet and about three months to use it.  I have this problem with a lot of areas in our consumable closet - in fact, it hardly looks like we've used anything in the last two years at all (except maybe TP) - and I've just resigned myself to doing something about it later.  I'm not quite sure what I'll do, but it will be decided by the last week of January and that's enough of a decision for me.

But the pumpkin has caught my imagination, or my pregnancy brain, or maybe it's the season, or who knows what, and pumpkin is now the centerpiece of my culinary google searches.  We're working our way through all of the pumpkin-themed baked goods I can think of and still have about four cans left.  So far we've had pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin waffles (twice), pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin doughnuts with pumpkin glaze, pumpkin french toast, pumpkin German pancake, and pumpkin cookies.  This afternoon I looked into pumpkin eggnog recipes, and the next time I'm at the grocery store I'm getting cream cheese for pumpkin aeblskivers with maple-walnut-cream cheese filling and caramel syrup.  I think you can add pumpkin to just about any sweet baked good and come out okay.

Sophia, when we announced pumpkin German pancake for breakfast last Saturday morning, asked when we were going to stop having pumpkin in everything.  "When all of the pumpkin is gone," I told her, "and not before."

Even if I don't achieve moral victory over our 32 remaining cans of peas, I will triumph over the pumpkin.  Even if we have to eat pumpkin bread on our way to the plane out of here.