Its still a week away, but we couldn’t wait to celebrate. Every year we celebrate the coming of fall and halloween with a visit to the local farm to scour for the perfect pumpkins, pet the adorable farm animals and attempt the corn maze. We follow this with the traditional KT’s BBQ feast.

This year we were so excited to go to the farm, we actually went in the pouring rain….you think we’ve seen enough rain yet? But it was really fun despite being super cold. We walked around to pet the animals, then spent a good 5 minutes walking through the corn maze (it was a lot smaller this year due to the bad weather we’ve had), and then the rain came down on us…and it was cold. But I couldn’t resist searching for a perfect pumpkin, or rather 5 perfect pumpkins. While standing in line to checkout (which was also out in the pouring rain), we figured we would hit up the BBQ place and take it home to our warm abode, instead of the tiny outdoor seating area that we would normally sit. It was pretty darn scrumptious. BBQ Ribs, pulled pork, lots of sides of slaw, potatoes, beans and root beer (woo!!).

We were going to carve the pumpkins that night, but we were wiped out from a full day, so we held off until a few days later (today in fact). Jake chose to carve a semi-simple skeleton/cat combo, and I was going to carve this crazy and intricate pirate ship. But when we started hollowing out our pumpkins, we realized that they were both a little “soft”…and that my pumpkin probably wouldn’t be able to hack something that intricate without full-collapse, so I chose something a tad easier; a mummy.

To really get ourselves in the spirit of the season, every year we watch a Harry Potter movie (see it in the background on the kitchen table), as those movies always tend to feel “Halloweeny”. It’s really more like background noise since carving requires a lot of attention. Even though Jake is not a huge fan of carving pumpkins, we had a really fun night. We made cinnamon-sugar pumpkin seeds and hot apple spiced cider, which were both SUPER delicioso.

Oh I almost forgot… Last year we had a few furry friends discover our carved pumpkins and decided to make a delicious dinner of them for a few days (which needless to say was REALLY messy and sad since they destroyed our masterpiece carvings). I learned that if you rub tobasco sauce all over the inside and outside of your pumpkins before you put them out on display, it will dissuade the furry friends from destruction (we shall see how this works)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!