Great news: it's pumpkin banitsa season!!

Hello Fall!

Hello October!

Hello Tikvenik! (That's the actual name for pumpkin banitsa... tikvenik.)

I had my first piece of the pastry/sweet/delicious-ness of the year yesterday at school. This stuff is so tasty.  I probably should have just eaten tikvenik for lunch.  Clearly I wasn't thinking. <!--more-->

I love pumpkin. And tikvenik? Shredded pumpkin layered in filo dough with some walnuts and maybe some cinnamon and then baked until hot?!   Fall might not get much better than this. Really.

Truth be told, it's kind of like I am addicted (or just obsessed) to the stuff because at 6:45 in the morning I am already trying to figure out where I can get my next slice of tikvenik. My guess: lunch 11:15 am. Four hours from now.

Right now I am eating my first bowl of oatmeal and it's good. Don't get me wrong. In fact, it's my first bowl in months but I am dreaming of tikvenik. How sad is that?! Then I started thinking about the fact that I could make pumpkin-cinnamon oatmeal topped off with some walnuts. That thought kind of blew my mind. It might just be the best of both worlds--oatmeal and pumpkin.

The only problem?

I really don't want to haul a whole pumpkin home, cut it up and roast it before then being able to use is for my oatmeal. That seems like much too much work for me.

I'll just stick to the tikvenik.

(Oh and a special thanks to my bulgarian-twitter friends for being such lovely human-dictionaries. This would have been a really lame post had I either misspelled tikvenik every time or simply written tikve-something each time.)