National Pumpkin Pie Day

December 25th is National Pumpkin Pie Day in the United States.

This may seem an odd dish to have Christmas Day as its national day, given all the other foods associated with this day, such as turkey, Christmas pudding and fruitcake, but pumpkins are used in many different recipes in the US and are native to North America, and are popular during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.

Although the harvesting season for pumpkins - a type of squash - was earlier in the year, pumpkin pie is rarely made from the raw pumpkin itself, as this is certainly a harder way of doing it. The pie is made using a pie shell and rarely has a top crust. The interior filling is a pumpkin based custard that has been flavoured with spices, with cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg being the most common. When making pumpkin pie, many will normally use pre-made commercially available pumpkin pie filling, which comes with the spices included in it. Using a pre-made pie shell and pre-made filling certainly makes this an easy dish to prepare.

National Pumpkin Day

October 26th is National Pumpkin Day in the United States.

This is a logical time of year to be celebrating the pumpkin, for an annual holiday in which pumpkins traditionally play a large role is just a few days away - Halloween.

During Halloween, pumpkins are traditionally carved into spooky Jack O'Lantern faces, and then lit from within, but there are more uses for pumpkins than simply Halloween decorations. Rather than buying a real pumpkin for Halloween, using it, then throwing it away, it can make more sense to buy a reusable plastic one, and save the pumpkin itself for cooking, although pumpkins used for cooking are usually different varieties to those used for carving.

Pumpkins are versatile, in that they can be used in both sweet and savoury recipes, and most parts of them are edible, including the shell, leaves, flowers and seeds, not just the flesh itself. Pumpkins themselves are a type of winter squash, and another popular holiday that uses them, this time for eating, is Thanksgiving, when pumpkin pie is a popular dessert.

National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day

National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day is on October 21st in the United States.

Pumpkins are a type of squash, distinctive for their orange colouration and size, that are native to North America. They are in season at this time of year, and are strongly associated with Halloween, so one method of preparing them is as a cheesecake.

Pumpkins are quite a versatile vegetable, being used in both sweet and savoury dishes. This dish is, naturally, one of the sweet ones. In a pumpkin cheesecake, the most common method of preparation would use biscuits (or equivalent) as the base, then the cheese and finally it would be topped off with the pumpkin. Cheesecakes are made with many different flavourings and toppings.

Although you could make your own from a fresh pumpkin, pre-prepared pumpkin filling is commercially available. There is a difference between tinned pumpkin and pumpkin filling, though; the latter comes with spices added and is suitable for immediate use, whilst the former is simply tinned pumpkin.