Mmmmmmmmmm. Pumpkin.

Holly and I are fans of food, and every season we’ve got something else to look forward to on the menu. When we recorded this episode, it was high pumpkin season, though the year has turned more toward  peppermint since then. This seasonality of (processed) food got us thinking: Which treats are available (and heavily marketed) only at certain times of the year? And why?

We didn’t say this in the recording, but for the sake of total transparency, Holly and I did not receive any money from anybody for any discussion of any of these delicious things, and also our thoughts on all these things are solely our own.

On the menu:

• Pumpkin everything
• Pumpkin spice latte vs. salted caramel mocha
• Peppermint latte (I meant to say peppermint mocha)  (AND I have learned since then that it is available in skinny format. In that I delight.)
• Organic fair trade bean-to-bar chocolate and gourmet farm-to-table burger places (in my brain when I mentioned these were Theo chocolate and Farmburger)
• A barbecue place with chocolatey brisket
• Moravian cookies and Moravian lovefeast, a regional thing from where I grow up
• Peeps chocolate mousse cats, which listener Duskborne already sent us a link to buy before I even started on these show notes
• Peep dioramas and plush Peeps and the urgent need for Holly and me to make chocolate mousse Peep s’mores as soon as we follow the link Duskborne sent us to buy some
• Cadbury crème eggs
• Returning to the pumpkin theme: pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin pie Pop-Tarts (which are already 404 at the Kellogg site)
• Nonfat frozen yogurt places which, similar to organic fair trade bean-to-bar chocolate and gourmet farm-to-table burger places are now all over American cities
• My lack of self-control when it comes to several Hershey’s Kiss flavors, including cherry cordial, and some Holly loves, like pumpkin spice and candy corn
• Many flavors of candy corn
• Holly’s life as a human-insect hybrid
• Mellow Mushroom‘s harvest pie, which has squash on
• Pumpkin spice almonds and pumpkin donuts
• I don’t know if you can tell, and I won’t speak for Holly, but right about now in this recording is when my mind started to shut down due to the combined weight of the lunchtime hour and our talking about food
• Thanksgiving sandwiches and salads
• Pumpkin crème cupcakes
• The one and only one statistic we brought to this podcast: On average Americans consume an extra 600 calories a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, according to Men’s Health
• Egg nog and persimmon pudding
• The importance of documenting family recipes
• Snow cream ice cream
• Seasonal Oreos, peppermint shakes and peppermint bark
• Milky Way eggs and recent advances in M&M technology
• The strange irony of hollow chocolate Easter bunnies
• ThinkGeek.com’s exceptionally fantastic apology for a sad incident involving disastrous shipping of zombie Easter bunnies
• Egg recipes Holly loves around Easter
• Watermelon and my hatred thereof
• My favorite Valentine’s day food, garlic
• St. Patrick’s day, green foods and beverages, and the many layers of connotation in Americans’ St. Paddy’s celebration
• Mardi Gras and king cake and the really serendipitous accidental visit I made to a New Orleans-themed restaurant on Mardi Gras
• Our theories on why seasonal food offerings seem to have taken off
• The role of the pig pickin’ and Brunswick stew in the South
• Our first ever listener mail reading! This one’s from listener Brooke on our Spoiler Alert episode.
• “Could holiday foods help save the planet?“

Link to the episode: Holiday Foods: Get Your Pumpkin On

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