Very Pumpkin Oatmeal

A hefty serving of pumpkin earns Very Pumpkin Oatmeal its name. While some other recipes treat pumpkin like a garnish, we don’t skimp. One cup of oats to one cup of pumpkin purée makes for a very filling (and delicious!) bowl of porridge.

As a matter of taste, “pumpkin” is a bit elusive. It’s more an effort of modern desire — and ingenuity — than a standalone flavor. Sure, many varieties of pumpkin can be roasted and puréed, and deliciously so. But for the purposes of mass production, this particular squash can also be stringy and bland. In 2017, Food and Wine reported that commercial canned “pumpkin” is really a medley of reliably sweeter and smoother squash, like butternut and Hubbard. And then there’s “pumpkin spice,” that mysterious mix of namesake seasonings, which has no pumpkin in it at all.

But our love of pumpkin isn’t really about ingredients, is it? It’s about packing everything we find delicious and fun about autumn into one convenient bite: grandma’s pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, warm cider at the county fair. Mostly, our obsession with pumpkin each October is about reclaiming that deliciously happy place where taste and memory meet.

Perhaps our forebears were doing the same thing when they encountered this strange, new squash in America. From the time the Pilgrims began cooking pumpkin they were enhancing its flavor with imported spices from Asia that they already knew and loved.

Nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger — all were highly popular among Europeans in those days, and they were used plentifully by those who could afford to do so. One can imagine an early American immigrant adding a pinch or two of Indonesian nutmeg (which by some accounts was as common then as pepper) to the pumpkin roasting on the fire. The fact that we’ve come to associate Southeast Asian spices with an American fruit is perhaps just as much a matter of luck, as it is of taste.

Yet to this day our culinary dance with pumpkin endures, delivering seasonal favorites like pumpkin pie and controversial newcomers like pumpkin spice lattes. On the spectrum of pumpkin experimentation, pumpkin oatmeal falls somewhere, respectably, in between.

For this Very Pumpkin Oatmeal, we settled on thick steel cut oats, canned Libby’s, and a simple mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. It’s an exciting combination of taste and texture, familiar enough to embrace for the first meal of the day, and just different enough to keep breakfast interesting. We hope you enjoy this cozy taste of history as much as we do.

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INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup canned pumpkin

• 1 cup 5-minute steel-cut oats
  (quicker versions will turn to mush)

• 1-1/2 cups water

• 1 cup milk (or alternate milk of your choice)

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

• 1/8 teaspoon cloves

• 1/4 cup maple syrup

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Directions

• Combine the pumpkin, oats, water, milk and salt in a pot over medium-high heat.
• Bring the mixture to a boil and stir in the vanilla. Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• When the oats have soaked up all the liquid, stir in the spices and maple syrup, and turn off the heat.
• Top a bowl of pumpkin oatmeal with toasted nuts, sliced bananas or green apple chunks.

START TO FINISH: 10-15 MINUTES. SERVES 4.