Cheap Thrills: Pumpkin Time

It's nearly Halloween, and we have yet to pick out a pumpkin for my husband to carve. Horrors! It's hard to find a perfect pumpkin, and we've been known to spend an October afternoon driving around to farm stands and garden shops, hunting for just the right shape and size, and eating cider donuts wherever we find them. I guess that will be our agenda for Saturday. I'm in the mood to carve, too, so we need two pumpkins.

I believe that much of a pumpkin's charm is in its stem — and since most stems are cut as short as possible, that makes the search more difficult.

Fortunately, the folks who harvest the teeny-tiny pumpkins seem to have more aesthetic appreciation for the stems. I've been filling my old Japanese bowl (a birthday gift found in the Big Chicken Barn in Maine) with baby pumpkins from farmer's markets and grocery stores around town. They rarely cost more than a dollar, and they last: one of last year's pumpkins survived until July!

Note the eloquent stems:

It's probably only a matter of time before one or two of these pumpkins gets abducted by a marauding Possum. Looking forward to it.