If you opened up your Facebook to find everywhere... everyone is posting that YOUR PUMPKIN IS A LIE... you maybe crumbled a little inside for a minute. Am I right? Because if you are like me you have been living for the first day of Fall so that you could be everything pumpkin from now until the end of November when you put up the Christmas Tree. It's the longest, most beautiful time of the year. I am a Libra, so I may be a little bias, but I love Fall and everything pumpkin about it. 

So the big posts are that your pumpkin really isn't pumpkin at all. So let's discuss that. What is a pumpkin? There are more than 30 varieties of pumpkins, and they range from small, intermediate, large all the way up to jumbo. And you may not realize that not all pumpkins are even orange. Get out of town!!

Dickinson Pumpkins are an heirloom pumpkin. They grow to be about 40 pounds, and they have a sweet, fleshy consistency. This is the variety that Libbey's uses in its pumpkin pie filling, and what you've probably used in those pumpkin cookies you love to make with a box of gluten-free cake mix every year. ... you know the ones with those little Enjoy Life mini chocolate chips in them? 



So why does this tan little pumpkin get the shaft as being any less pumpkin than any other pumpkin out there? Most likely because it's not bright orange, and it gives bloggers something to freak out about. Just like you may have a desire to eat cherry tomatoes over grape tomatoes, or english cucumbers over persian cucumbers. There are a lot of pumpkins in the world. So in order for me to keep it simple let me just say that pumpkin is one type of squash. So finding out that your pumpkin puree is actually squash is sort of laughable to me. So is your canned or boxed pumpkin puree made out of squash... why yes it is because pumpkin is squash. So don't get me all sad and bogged down in the idea that I have to go out, gather, cook, and puree my own box of pumpkin just to enjoy the season.

If you've always enjoyed your Dickinson or other variety of Pumpkin Puree, then please keep enjoying it. Add your pumpkin spices, because I know you will, and is it then any different than using any other squash out there? Probably not. So I say go for it. Stop picking at things that aren't really needing to be picked at. Want to get serious, get serious over the BPA in cans. Get serious over the pesticides used on your crops. Get serious about something bigger than the fact that one squash is more orange then the next. Grab your hot apple cider, your little mini gluten-free donuts and pull on those waders to go out to the fields and gather a pumpkin to paint with your kids. That to me is where the type of Pumpkin really matters most.