Anyone else remember the old Looney Tunes “Wabbit season!…. Duck season!…. Elmer season?”

Somehow I have pulled off the posters and found “Pumpkin Spice Season and Conference Season.” And for the love of mercy, someone needs to thin the herd somehow!

I don’t think I’ve ever hit a schedule of 9 conferences in 5 weeks before. Flights of Foundry was two weeks ago, Rainbow Space Magic was last weekend, HearthCon and Cozy the Day Away are this weekend (I’m both presenting and running tech support), next week is WordPress Global Accessibility Day, the weekend after that is the Self-Publishing Advice Conference, and that’s before I start listing off the too-personally-identifiable conferences at my university.

I’ve just finished making the “In case of excessive virality, break glass and transfer the load to Google” emergency backup spreadsheet of book links for the Cozy the Day Away sale, because previous sales have caused the Bluehost server to struggle under the weight of thousands of cozy fantasy fans wanting at 90some books… and this time we’ve got 160 plus the attention of the entirety of HearthCon!

So if the server says “help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” I can throw out the spreadsheet link. The spreadsheet is not beautiful and filterable and personalized by each author… but Google can take the kind of load hits most other services can’t and keep on ticking. Still, here’s hoping cache tuning and view size reframing will buy us some breathing room? I am not actually a server admin, I am a user interface and metadata structure person. But I’ve hung out with enough server admins to have a vague idea of which words to look for in case of viral-necessary tuning?

Anyhow, I should find a recipe to post with this!

I have been vastly amused by the Cookbook Diss Tracks being laid down between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. Ishaq al-Mawsili’s grudge chased Ziryab from Baghdad to as close to the far end of the continent as he could get without falling into the ocean… and then Ziryab turned around and set up cultural court in Cordoba and laid down the culture and etiquette and personal grooming and fine dining standards that have lasted most of the next thousand years. But that needs to be a future blog post, because I have now formally Pumpkin Spiced Myself FOR SCIENCE.

Self, I thought, how can you call yourself a cozy fantasy writer if you have not tasted Starbucks’ own legendary Pumpkin Spice Latte? You should do that for HearthCon.

Self, I also thought, you have not previously done this because your body really, really hates coffee. Do not do food sensitivity-adjacent biological experiments during a two day convention where you’re also tech support.

So, last weekend and not this weekend, I turned myself into my own lab critter.

The lab notebook annotations include:

 “Pumpkin spice” as a spice doesn’t technically have to have pumpkin itself in it, but yum! Very much nutmeg-forward on the spice blend, or else the sprinkle on the top was. I’ve been contemplating how I might add pumpkin-per-se to my own chai and reading up on how different folks recreate the pumpkin-having parts of Starbucks PSLs and came up with the variations below.

 Really, Starbucks? 21 different modification dropdown menus with over 100 options for a single beverage? My low vision self made brain-frying noises trying to navigate through the system and I just hit the “default order” button on the iced pumpkin spice chai, because there was no coffee in it (theoretically).

Have you ever accidentally melted Culver’s pumpkin ice cream and then drank it anyway? The default-settings iced pumpkin spice chai tasted very much like that to me. 

 Some mistakes were made. I’d wondered if Starbucks might have enough Ambient Coffee in their water system for my food sensitivities to protest? Some empirical experimentation later: 

 Yeah it was a good thing I did this the weekend before HearthCon and Cozy the Day Away tech support, because my body went into full-on “As per my LAST EMAIL…”

 Still. Food science has been scienced, complete with accidental biohazards. For SCIENCE!

If you’re not from the land of home-baked pumpkin pies…

The overlap between the ingredients in chai masala, poudre douce, and what you get in a jar of McCormick’s pumpkin spice mix are pretty high. Generally speaking, you’ll take out the black pepper and cardamom and add more nutmeg, but here’s what you get in a jar of McCormick’s pumpkin spice (which does not include pumpkin itself):

• Cinnamon
• Ginger
• Nutmeg
• Allspice
• A sulfiting agent

Compare that to versions of poudre douce from Le Menagier de Paris:

(One version)

• Cinnamon
• Ginger
• Nutmeg
• Grains of paradise
• Sugar

(Another version)

• Cinnamon
• Ginger
• Cloves
• Bay leaves

And then compare that to the simple base and complex variations of atraf al-tib from Kitab al-Tabikh:

• Cardamom
• Ginger
• Cloves
• (optional) Bay leaves
• (optional) Rose petals
• (more options if you like them) Nutmeg, mace, black pepper, spikenard…

I haven’t seen bay leaves or spikenard listed in a chai masala blend, but all the rest of it, including cinnamon and black pepper, have made appearances in different chai masala variations I’ve seen.

I currently live in the state that produces more pumpkins than anywhere else on the continent, and lived downwind of a pumpkin packing plant for quite a while. Somehow it smells much better coming out of the can than it did going in, and I don’t know what alchemy is necessary for that to happen. But as a result, there have always been cans of pureed pumpkin available year round in my area.

If you don’t have that available? Acorn squash or butternut squash make pretty good substitutes when you sweeten them and puree them and toss in some of the aforementioned pumpkin spice.

Or if you enjoy egg custard, the relationship between custard tart spice and pumpkin spice is pretty high too. And an American-style (sweet) pumpkin pie is much closer to a sweet custard tart than to a savory quiche.

When studying in the UK, the hosting university tried very earnestly to throw us a Thanksgiving feast complete with “pumpkin pie.” It was, yes, technically a pie containing pumpkin. But it was a savory pie containing slices of roasted pumpkin, skin and all, and — spoiler alert — you can’t roast most large orange carving-style pumpkins skin and all the way you could do with an eggplant. The big carveable ones have been bred to be tough enough to stand up to both overenthusiastic kids with serrated knives and squirrels delighted by the newfound entrance to the juicy meats inside, once that annoying candle in the guts burns itself out.

So a can of pumpkin puree and a pastry pie crust is how most folks start their pumpkin pies around here. But if you don’t think you can use a whole can of pumpkin puree, or if your neighbors are avid gardeners and you haven’t locked your porch/patio/garage/car trunk/anything in which a box of squash may be “helpfully” deposited and you’re desperate for something to do with the overflow?

Homemade pumpkin or other squash puree

For additional Starbucksification of your hot caffeinated beverage, should you so desire.

(The low spoons way for me to do this is to buy a can of puree, but that may not be as easy elsewhere, so…)

• A squash or two
• A baking dish which will hold them both when cut in half
• Enough water to fill about 1/4 inch of the baking dish for extra steaming

Preheat an oven to 350 F / 175 C.

Halve your squash and take the seeds out.

Put about 1/4 inch of water in the bottom of your baking dish.

Put the squash cut side down on the baking dish. The water should help it steam rather than brown and glaze.

Roast your squash for about 45 minutes to an hour, until soft when poked with a fork.

Let it cool enough to handle, then scoop the innards away from the skin.

Mash it up with forks, a potato masher, or a blender, your preference.

If it’s a stringy squash you might want to press it lightly through a wire mesh sieve to extract the pulp and leave the strings behind.

You can either spice it to taste now or add spices later. I tend to add the spices later once I know what else is going into it (eggs and cream for a pie or tart, or tea/coffee for a beverage, or maybe I would make a big bowl of Carmarthenshire Welsh stwmp with as many mashable root vegetables as I could lay hands on, in which case I’m not going to want it pre-sweet-spiced for lattefication.)

Refrigerate until ready to use.

Imitation Starfaring Beverage with Pumpkin And Spice

• Pumpkin puree (as above or from a can), about 2 Tbsp per beverage
• La Lechera squeeze bottle (easy mode) or a can of sweetened condensed milk, about 2 Tbsp per beverage
  • Avoiding cow milk? Nut or soy milks plus some sugar will be thinner but taste similar
  • Egg nog flavored non dairy creamer can also bring a very similar spice profile, in which case you probably won’t need as much pumpkin spice
  • If you aren’t using sweetened condensed milk, you may want honey or simple syrup.
• Pumpkin spice blend (McCormick or home-blended to taste), about 1/4 tsp per beverage
• Hot beverage of your choice (coffee, masala chai, hot milk, hot milk alternative…)
  • Making tea or masala chai? You may want to brew it stronger than usual to stand up to the extra pumpkin and milk-or-alternative.
• Ground nutmeg to dust the top with
• (Optional) Whipped cream or alternative
• (Optional) Whichever of the 100some other Starbucks additions makes you happy!

For a 12-16 oz mug:

• 2 Tbsp ish pumpkin puree
• 2 Tbsp ish sweetened condensed milk (squeeze bottle or can)
  OR
  Non dairy milk and sweeetener to taste
• When preparing the hot beverage, stir the dry pumpkin spice in so that it gets a chance to cook along with the tea leaves (or the milk simmering or coffee brewing).
• Fill most of the rest of the mug with your hot beverage.
• Stir vigorously to blend together, and taste test to check the sweet-to-spice balance before topping.
• (Optional) Apply whipped cream or whipped non-dairy alternative to the top of the hot beverage
• (Optional) Dust with nutmeg

Sip, purr, repeat.