The pumpkin soup was quite good–but not until the next day. Unlike butternut squash, calabasa, or many other squashes, most pumpkins you find in the store are a bit less flavorful and therefore benefit from a little time to absorb seasonings. If you really want tasty pumpkin, look for “cooking pumpkins”–they’re smaller than those enormous “carving pumpkins” you see right now, which taste like candle wax and are really best used only as decoration.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember exactly what I put in the white pumpkin soup. But the Calabasa Soup recipe from February is a good starting point for any squashy soup. If you’re vegetarian, just substitute vegetable stock for chicken and add more garlic and onion to increase flavor.

And now for other news.

FRED IS HERE!!!

Not permanently, but for the weekend, as we look for a house here in Durham. We are down to four possibilities (really, only two) and should visit them sometime tomorrow. Our top choice is a “botanical paradise in southwest Durham”–a 1962 ranch house on half an acre, owned by a landscape architect. As long as the wooded lot across the street is not slated to be turned into a gas station or strip mall, that could end up being our new home. It has an outdoor shower. (And one inside too.) That’s enough for me.

For dinner tonight, in a fall harvest extravaganza, Fred is having pork chops, roasted vegetables (golden beets, carrots, sweet potato, and onion) and possibly mashed turnips. I went to Whole Paycheck to purchase the meat and ended up buying all the food for the meal there. Their marketing is absolutely masterful–you are sucked in like an ant up an armadillo snout, and the next thing you know you and your entire savings account have been digested and absorbed in the giant beast of corporate profit.

And on top of all that, I couldn’t even get parsnips there because they had gone floppy. And one of the potatoes I bought was rotted inside. I thought about returning it, but I’m afraid to go back in.