The wheel has turned around to spooky time again and here is our first lady pumpkin Theodora saying hi.

Last year my partner and I hadn’t had a functioning kitchen in our new home for Halloween yet, so you got a horror story instead of food. This year our kitchen is almost fully finished and I’ll show it to you soon, so we went back to our pumpkin food day tradition.

The 2023 pumpkin food menu consisted of lasagna Bolognese (a good recipe here) with iceberg lettuce salad with pumpkin seed oil (of course) and pumpkin spice cacao cookies for dessert. The lasagna was originally supposed to be a pumpkin Bolognese lasagna in keeping with the “everything pumpkin” tradition, but unfortunately Theodora proved to be a very tough, diminutive lady and a true sister to last year’s equally tough Gonzo, so there simply wasn’t enough pumpkin meat to make everything. It was still delicious though and you can see a sneak peak of our fancy new dining table and benches below.

Pumpkin food 2023

Bonus non-pumpkin item is the freshly baked bread le boyfriend made in the morning – it has been brought to my attention that people find it funny when I always call my partner “le boyfriend” on my Instagram stories and that I for some reason do not do the same on the blog, so I guess I’ll try for a unified approach to his nicknames from now on.

I also planned to share the recipe for the pumpkin spice cacao cookies in this post, but didn’t fully love how they turned out, so maybe next year. They’re good, just not spectacular enough, because I probably should have had more pumpkin purée available to get that intense pumpkin flavour, which is always difficult. In general, the best way to get the most flavour out of a pumpkin is to roast it in the oven first before blending it.

Anyhow, happy Halloween 2023 or whatever is happening in your day today! Did you cook anything pumpkin? Let me know in the comments below.