Watch Out, It's Pumpkin Slice Season

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are changing, the mornings are getting chilly, the Halloween décor is all on display at every store you go to “just to look” but leave with $50 worth of merchandise because DUH, spooky vibes. But the one thing more important if not the most important, the quintessential fall staple that oversaturates food, drinks, decorations, clothing, your emails, your thoughts. And we salivate for it, we yearn for it, we fantasize about the moment we can get our hands on it and monstrously devour it, much like a vampire on a bag of blood after being asleep for 1200 years. It is our life force during the cooler months; we cannot stop ourselves. We crave it, we need it, we obsess over it. None of us are immune to its intoxicating power, its symbolism, its deliciousness, its magic. We need to feed, we MUST feed. What am I talking about? Pumpkin, of course. But you already knew that. Pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin beer; even pumpkin Cheerios. A pumpkin explosion that we so desperately have been lusting for ever since we see a package of orange string lights for sale in late July at the back of Target, gingerly teasing us as to what is to come.

I must admit that my sister Jenna and I are no exception to this pumpkin trance. Every year in mid-September we would rush to the store for cans of it and delightfully invent ways to bake with it. Pumpkin waffles, pumpkin cupcakes, pumpkin anything. You name a dessert, we made it. We manically pumpkin-ified it all, like mad scientists mixing concoctions and potions. We delightfully guzzled down our overpriced PSLs to wash it all down. But it wasn’t enough; it was never enough. Like any elder millennial peer of ours, we needed to consume more. We needed a new way to integrate pumpkin into something savory and more satisfying, like dinner. Quickly after this realization, I had a thought pop into my head, almost as if it were placed there by a higher pumpkin power. Pumpkin mac and cheese. It was perfect, it was exquisite. Jenna’s eyes widened with delight, her lips pursed, her head leisurely nodding. “Yesssss...” she murmured lowly, trying to hold back her excitement. I knew right then and there that this couldn’t be just any mac and cheese; this had to be the fanciest, end all be all of recipes. I was to be the Frankenstein of pumpkin mac and cheese, and Jenna was to be my Igor. We were ready to get to work.

We hauled into the car to fetch the ingredients. In order to be as fancy as possible, we selected smoked gouda and brie to be the perfect pairing with the earthiness of the pumpkin and the subtle spice of nutmeg and cinnamon. We enthusiastically shouted at our dad, who was watching football and enjoying some Cabernet in the next room, what we were crafting. He frowned, much to our dismay. “Um, I get pumpkin desserts, but mac and cheese? Sounds...weird. No thanks, I guess I’m just going to make a sandwich for dinner,” he comments, taking a sip from his glass and turning back to his game. No matter, more for us to scarf. I began cooking the macaroni and bechamel sauce, which is just a thickened sauce made with milk, butter, and flour. I mixed in the pumpkin, touch of nutmeg, and cinnamon in and began to watch the sauce magically turn to that signature shade of orange that gets all of our hearts pounding. When the macaroni finished, Jenna grated the smoked gouda and handed it to me. I slowly added it to the sauce; we could smell how decadent it was already and marveled at our creation. The last thing to do was to add the brie, which I carefully would add at the very end since it was such a light, creamy cheese. The thing about brie is that it has a rind, and must be cut off before you add it to a dish. I placed the brie on my cutting board rind side up and grabbed my chef's knife. I began cutting into it; my plan was to cut the rind off the top, sliding my knife from left to right as I held the brie in place with my other hand. The rind was stubborn and seemed impossible to be separated. In that moment, my patience was wavering. The intoxicating smell of pumpkin was in the air, my stomach was growling, and my mouth was aggressively watering. As I pushed the knife with all my strength into the rind, I felt the knife cleanly run through. “Ah YES! Finally, the rind is off!” I had thought once it was done. The satisfying euphoria I experienced once the brie was separated was immediately halted when I felt a searing pain in my thumb. I looked down at the hand that was holding the cheese in place and saw blood gushing out of the side of my thumb like a geyser. By forcing the knife through the cheese, it cut through the rind and gashed the side of my thumb open. I immediately toss the knife aside and rush over to the sink and put my hand under running water. The reality really sets in that I might have just seriously injured myself, all in the name of pumpkin. Jenna runs out of the room, white as a ghost and holding back from throwing up; saying she did not do well around blood was a major understatement. As I watch the water turning bright red and funneling down the drain, I start to panic. My heart starts pounding. I begin sweating. My thoughts start racing at a mile a minute. “What if I need stitches? Oh my god, I need to go to the hospital. What if I die from too much blood loss? THIS IS REALLY BAD THIS IS SO BAD.” Just as I think to myself how worked up I am getting and need to sit down, everything goes black. If you have never fainted before, it’s very difficult to describe what it feels like. It’s like you’re standing there, awake, and then you’re just on the floor with no memory of how you got there. One second I was standing at the sink, the next I was watching my dad running towards me on the floor and holding his hand out to me to grab it. At first when I open my eyes, I couldn’t hear anything. I could only see him mouthing my name. He pulls me up, terrified, and now that I can hear again, he’s asking over and over again if I’m ok. “I think so,” I say nervously, still very confused. I look down at my arm, which is now completely covered in blood, and suddenly remember what just happened. I rush to my feet and rinse off my warm, sticky arm in the sink. My sister hesitantly peeks around the corner and is shouting in terror. Apparently when I hit the floor like a sack of bricks, I did so with my eyes open, just lifeless and bloody on the floor; a sight truly out of a horror movie. “Yea I just...I just freaked out, I think I’m ok though,” I stammer, at this point still sweating. I wrapped my thumb in paper towels and put what was probably an entire box of band-aids over it, but even that was not enough to stop the bleeding. Once the chaos settled a bit, I decide that I should probably go the hospital just in case I need stitches. My sister offers to drive me as I am completely shaken up and out of it from passing out. Luckily, we lived 5 minutes from the hospital and the ER was slow that night, so I was seen immediately. I begin to tell the nurse the most elaborate story of the wondrous pumpkin mac and cheese, the brie, the blood, the fainting, everything. My voice trembles as I speak about how fatal my thumb injury was and how much it hurts. I start sweating again thinking about having stitches put in. “It’s bad, it’s so bad. I don’t want to look at it again,” I stammer. She unwraps the bloody paper towels as I’m turning away and squeezing my eyes shut. She pauses for a moment after holding my hand, lets out a relieving sigh, and affectionately tells me I can look now. “Oh honey, you don’t need stitches. I’m going to give you a fresh band aid.” It turns out that I barely even cut it that deep; no matter how superficial a cut on your hand is, it's usually going to bleed way more than you think it will since a lot of blood is stored in your fingers. Jenna and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Maybe this truly wasn’t such a nightmare as I thought it was!

All the chaos involving my slit thumb made me completely unaware of the two golf ball sized lumps on both sides of my head. After speaking with a couple doctors after my finger was taken care of, they informed me that I did have a concussion as a result of the fall. Apparently when I fainted, I hit the left side of my head on the refrigerator on the way down and the right side on the floor. That did explain why I was immediately deaf when I came to. After giving me a stack of paperwork of care instructions for a concussion, Jenna and I finally went home. The chaos was settled and we could finally relax. She informed our dad of what the doctors said and he was just as excited as I was that I was going to be ok. “Wait, the pumpkin mac!” I exclaimed, looking at the pots still on the stove just as we left it. “What, you still want to finish it? After all you went through??” my sister asked, confused. “We HAVE to, otherwise none of this was worth it!” I responded. I assured her that I wanted to finish it, we had come so far. I turned the heat back on to reheat the sauce and grabbed the brie that was still whole from the fridge. Thankfully I didn’t get any blood on it; it was a pumpkin spice miracle. I added the brie to the sauce and stirred in the macaroni, hearing that magical sound only a great mac and cheese makes when combined properly. It was a beautiful sight; the dish that brought me to the hospital was finally complete. Jenna and I filled up our plates and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. We dug our forks in at the same time, and brought a giant, cheesy, pumpkin-y, steaming bite up to our lips. We looked at each other, smiled, and took a bite. The minute it hit my tongue it awakened my mouth with flavor. It was creamy, spicy, decadent; absolute perfection. Despite having a cut finger, 2 lumps on my head, and a concussion, I escaped for a moment and was in pumpkin mac and cheese paradise. I could tell that Jenna felt the same way. We just looked at each other in awe of what we had created. There was no need for words; it was that good. We enjoyed two giant plates of our masterpiece together, at midnight, after spending hours in the hospital. Though it was truly a terrible experience getting hurt, the end result was even better than I could have ever expected. It was absolutely worth it in the end. Jenna and I joke to this day about the time our pumpkin madness brought me to the hospital but we had the best pumpkin mac and cheese we’ve ever had. My only word of caution would be to watch out when cutting the rind off cheese; beware of the pumpkin slice.