The great pumpkin onslaught

By now you’ve probably felt drops from the oncoming deluge: You’ve been faced with the pumpkin ice cream and the pumpkin cookies, the pumpkin beers and the pumpkin soups. This is just the beginning, I’m afraid to say. From now until Halloween there will be pumpkin cakes and pumpkin casseroles and pumpkin martinis.

Will it all be bad? No. Just most of it. Like pumpkin ales, pumpkin-flavored foods veer toward the artificially orange and the overly sweet. There are exceptions to the beers, of course. And the Bobtail pumpkin ice cream is well-loved around the TOC offices. But my favorite incarnation of pumpkin so far this year has been what landed on my desk this morning: Milk & Honey’s Pumpkin Spice granola.

This stuff doesn’t have a strong pumpkin flavor, really. What is does have is a wallop of pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, et al), crunchy pumpkin seeds, the buttery brown-sugar notes that are characteristic of Milk & Honey’s granolas and some chewy cranberries offering a tart counterpoint. Like most pumpkin items it’s a seasonal thing—it’ll only be around through the end of the year—making it perhaps the only pumpkin product I’m going to hate to see go away.