It’s fall, and as such there are certainly obligatory culinary endeavors in which one must partake.

Notice that I did not end the above sentence with a preposition. But I digress.

Fall requires a lot of foods that start with “P.”

In order of operations, we shall first consider pumpkins. It was a long, long time before I connected jack-o-lanterns with canned pumpkin. But then, it was also a long, long time before I realized that when my mother “painted” our (sore) throats, she used Argerall (for internal use) and NOT Mercurochrome (for cuts and bruises, not to be ingested). Thank you, sister Laura, for finally setting me straight. In my defense, I was little, and busy squirming away from the cotton-swab that was heading down past my uvula, and the two medicines look very much the same when dripping from the end of a cotton-encased willow twig.

Anyway, pumpkins: this Halloween I dragged my adult boys, Elder and Younger, over to the house to carve pumpkins, and we saved the seeds, which I carefully roasted according to some directions I found online. (In a nutshell: Get the goop off, grease the baking sheet, bake about 45 minutes at around 200 degrees.) Trust me, they are delicious and full of nutty protein. And THEN, I waited until a few days after Halloween, chopped up the biggest pumpkin, and using my husband’s fancy new electronic pressure canner, I put up five pints of pumpkin, one of which has already been baked in a pie. Do I get a sticker?

Next, let us consider the humble potato. As a child I utterly refused to touch sweet potatoes and would eat only the skin of the regular kind. I would scoop the mealy, fragrant inside of the potato disdainfully onto my plate, fill the peel with as much butter as I could get it to hold, and slurp it on down. Now, my husband and I grow our own potatoes, and I eat all portions thereof.

Side note: last year my husband, heading off to join me on one of my northern adventures, bought some straw which he spread over the potato crop to help it stay moist. When he came back the straw had sprouted into beautiful stalks of wheat, resulting in a double-decker yield. No, I haven’t ground up any flour as yet, but the decade is young.

I assume, wise reader, that you have noticed that I wrote my title in quasi-outline form and are therefore wondering what I might have to say about peppermint chipmunks. Wonder no more! It all started with the pumpkin spice flavor that took the world by storm some years ago. Pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin spice muffins, pumpkin spice potpourri. . .then came the tongue-in-cheek ads for such things as pumpkin spice motor oil and furniture polish. (Alas, the folks who produced these ads felt obliged to add foot notes stating that these were “jokes,” and therefore one should most definitely not try to drink motor oil, pumpkin spice or not.)

As for how the pumpkin spice lattes eventually segued into pumpkin spice horses, and thence to peppermint chipmunks, I’m going to let the Onion, that august source of reliable news, tell it in their own words:

God Releases New Peppermint-Flavored Chipmunks For The Holidays – The Onion

Enjoy, and thanks to niece Helen for the link.