Off My Gourd
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love pumpkin-spice-everything season. Plus, a recipe!
I went to Trader Joe’s this weekend.
It’s become trendy in some corners of the internet to deride the grocery chain—the claim being that it’s a store for people who don’t know how to cook, owing to its preponderence of pre-packaged and prepared foods. While I see a kernel of truth in that criticism—invariably, I need to make a stop at Kroger on the way home from Trader Joe’s to get the ingredients they didn’t have—I’m still a big fan of the chain. Their produce is reliably good, their frozen pastas form a large portion of my kids’ non-complaining-dinner rotation, and it’s just an easy store to get around.
Anyways, I’m not writing this to endorse Trader Joe’s—unless they want to pay me.
(Joe, if you’re reading: call me.)
No, it’s rather to recount the singular experience of walking into the store this time of year. Sometime in mid-to-late September, a switch is flipped, and it’s no longer a grocery store. It’s a palace of pumpkins. A garden of gourds. A symphony of squash-simulating seasonal specialities. Seemingly everything in the store takes on a pumpkin theme, and no aisle is left untouched. There’s pumpkin cookies and pumpkin bread, pumpkin pancake mix and pumpkin pretzels, pumpkin pasta and pumpkin pasta sauce, pumpkin tortilla chips, pumpkin macaroni and cheese, pumpkin empanadas, pumpkin samosas and pumpkin Greek yogurt.
The clock has struck midnight, and Cinderella’s taking all of us down with her.
Of course, this isn’t unique to Trader Joe’s, even if they embrace it with a madman’s zeal. Pumpkin-themed products are everywhere this time of year, from the bakery to the brewery, and if you’re like me, you fall for them every year. For more than a decade, I’d excitedly buy a six-pack of pumpkin-flavored beer at the first blush of fall, only to find myself with four or five remaining in the back of the fridge by St. Patrick’s Day after remembering that I don’t actually care much for flavored beer.
Nevertheless, I persist.
There’s nowhere and nothing that exemplifies our collective seasonal mass delusion than the Pumpkin Spice Latte. The drink—first offered by Starbucks twenty (!) years ago—is both patient zero of the pumpkin trend and its still-reigning champ, the drink that launched a thousand cinnamon-clove-and-nutmeg ships. It’s an object of frequent scorn for hack comedians—surely in part due to its being coded as something women like—but I’m a fan, and I don’t care what anyone says. Yes, it’s loaded with sugar, and finishing one will leave me looking like a less-handsome version of Jason Statham in Crank 2: High Voltage, but I still relish the one I get every year.
I could turn up my nose at the trend, like many do, but where’s the fun in that? I love fall—it’s my favorite season of the year—but sometimes it drags its feet in fully arriving. (It’s been over 80 every day this week, and even that’s felt like a relief.)
It’s a small but very real pleasure to see the store shelves turn orange, a reassurance that yes, fall really is here.
Besides, if anyone should respect goofy culinary experimentation, it’s me.
I was even inspired to make my own entry into the genre.
A couple years ago here on The Action Cookbook Newsletter, I debuted a recipe I developed for Pumpkin Spice Pork Butt.
(I debut a lot of recipes here. One a week, actually, for more than four years running. Paying subscribers get access to all of them, organized in this neat little archive!)
This recipe might be one of the most perfectly representative examples of what I strive to do with food here—it’s a premise that sounds utterly silly on its face, but actually works spectacularly well as a dish.
The spices—the same ones you’d find in your latte or pretzels or whatever—are ones used with meat in a number of cuisines, and they complement the other flavors in this assemblage beautifully. It all comes together with less than a dozen ingredients and can be pulled off in an InstantPot or slow-cooker with minimal fuss. It’s a heck of a party trick, too—you could serve this to someone and have them enjoy a delicious stew and only tell them after the fact that it started as a fall-themed gimmick!
Pumpkin Spice Pork Butt
3 pounds pork shoulder, cut into 1” chunks
1 tablespoon pumpkin spice (homemade preferred, recipe below)