The Breslow Partners crew is ready to pull on our boots and sweaters and frolic through piles of colorful leaves in Rittenhouse Square. To appease our pumpkin latte-fueled fall frenzy, we decided to throw an autumn themed lunch party. Each person brought one of their favorite fall dishes, including  caramel apples and cinnamon donuts and –you guessed it- pumpkin.

With the Jack-O-Lantern’s prominent role in Halloween shenanigans, pumpkin picking and carving is always a popular fall activity, but this year, things are just out of hand. Despite the notoriously bad crop due to excessive rain, pumpkin is popping up everywhere – from pumpkin candles to pumpkin muffins to pumpkin body scrubs. People are just crazy about pumpkins this year, and we here at Breslow Partners have also caught the pumpkin bug.

At our autumn party, Brittney provided our pumpkin fix with a freshly baked pumpkin loaf from one of our favorite places,  Metropolitan Bakery. They lived up to their stellar reputation with a pumpkin loaf that was moist, spicy, and filled with chocolate chunks.

With the pumpkin shortage, pureed pumpkin has been difficult to find, but Mother Nature was kind enough to provide pumpkin-bent cooks with an equally delicious alternative – butternut squash. We had three butternut squash dishes at our party- soup, salad, and orzo.

We started off our meal with a cinnamon sweet butternut squash soup, a unique remake of the traditionally rich and buttery dish. The next course was a savory-sweet salad of spinach, cranberry, and butternut squash that was so delicious it was difficult to move on to the dish after that.

Our final butternut squash dish was orzo seasoned with a generous amount of parsley. While we would recommend the recipe, found at SeriousEats.com again, we recommend using dried, rather than fresh parsley, and much less of it.

Rachel switched out the pumpkin in the recipe for a home-pureed butternut squash, a delicious, yet time-consuming substitution.

Being an office full of women, our party had plenty of desserts to carry us through the rest of the week. Our resident college student, Madi, brought an assortment of fall donuts.

Finally, no childhood or – office party -is complete without a mouthful of sticky teeth, the caramel apple’s unavoidable parting gift.

 

Jen provided the quintessential autumn treat of caramel apples that left us dreaming of long lost days at the county fair and crisp evenings bobbing for apples.

The party was a huge success in welcoming in our favorite season. If you are still mourning the loss of lazy summer days, we encourage you to grab a scarf and run to your local bakery for some apple or pumpkin goodies. Trust us, they’ll pull you so far out of your post-summer funk, you’ll be planning your own autumn extravaganza in no time.