Every fall I get a culinary itch.

As soon as the mornings turn crisp and frosty, I fire up the oven and throw in anything that can be roasted and eaten.

By the time October rolled around this year, I already had whipped up some of my favorite recipes with roasted chicken and squash, stewed a variety of soups and baked molasses bread. But I wanted to try something new.

OK, I admit, I might have been inspired by the hit movie “Julie and Julia,” in which a working woman spends a year cooking and blogging her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering The Art of French Cooking.” How can you not be moved to the kitchen after watching Amy Adams, who plays Julie, taste delicious-looking, home-cooked cuisine over and over?

A fellow reporter, Aaron Burkhalter, has a tradition of cooking pumpkin dishes from scratch every year, so I thought I’d try my hand at it too. Squash move aside!

I needed help to navigate the possibilities for this newly discovered (to me) vegetable. I called Slow Food Skagit River Salish Sea, the local convivium of the international Slow Food movement that emphasizes eating locally grown foods and cooking at home.

Carol Havens, spokesperson for the local Slow Food organization, ran through the variety of dishes you can cook with pumpkin, elevating it from its lowly status of mere decoration to a delicious dish.

“I love pumpkins,” Havens said. “I love the texture. I love the flavor ... They’re a great food to adapt from the decorative world and move them into the food world because we’re already used to them (being available). They taste great, they’re inexpensive and they’re good for you. You can put them out on your front porch and they look great, then you can eat them.”

They’re also more than pie.

“I like them better from the savory end, personally,” she said.

She recommended a recipe from the Skagit Slow Food Web site adapted by Mount Vernon foodie Susanne Butler: Roasted Pumpkin Stuffed with Bread and Cheese.

Havens said I also should go to a local farm and talk to a farmer to pick out my pumpkins — grocery stores tend to stock bins of carving pumpkins, which are dry and flavorless, she said.

So, on a fittingly dreary, rainy fall day, I bundled up and headed out to Gordon Skagit Farms.

Gordon’s is one of several local farms that specializes in fall produce. Its pumpkin selection is spectacular with every shape and color you can imagine — long and skinny, pear-shaped, bright-orange, green-striped, yellow-striped and everything in between.

“We want to be the place that has everything you can think of — the weird stuff and the cool stuff,” co-owner Todd Gordon said.

The farm even has a new variety that looks like it has warts.

“That’s going to be popular,” said his brother and co-owner, Eddie Gordon.

But I was looking for flavor, not warts.

Gordon and his brother have run the farm for four decades and seem to know nearly everything about pumpkins.

As we strolled through the hundreds of pumpkins on display — and past a Halloween display of “Ghoulia Child,” a creepy ghost cooking in a kitchen — Eddie Gordon told me that about 15 years ago, there was a surge in pumpkins’ popularity and variety as decorating guru Martha Stewart used them in her shows and magazines. Increasingly, more people want to buy them for food. Restaurants as far away as Seattle buy pumpkins from the Gordon farm.

Eddie Gordon steered me to a pile of bright-orange, small-oblong Rockafellas pumpkins, and a medium-sized, faded-orange Dickinson Field pumpkin. He said to stay away from larger carving pumpkins; they tend to be stringy and lack flavor.

On my way home, I swung by the Skagit Valley Food Co-op to pick up my ingredients — sour cream, a baguette from the Bread Farm in Edison and French comte Gruyere cheese. The cheese was pricey, but worth it. Don’t skimp. Trust me.

I went over to my co-worker’s house — he’s a veritable old hack at pumpkin cuisine — and we went to work.

I cut a lid off the smaller Rockafellas pumpkin and layered slices of the baguette, dollops of sour cream and shredded Gruyere cheese, then baked it. I sliced the Dickinson Field pumpkin in half. Though the outside of the Dickinson Field is almost tan, the inside is a vibrant orange-red.

“It looks like a peach,” Burkhalter said.

We roasted the pumpkin, then pureed the inside for a cheesy pasta sauce, a modified recipe from Food Network celebrity chef Rachael Ray that tastes like a lighter version of homemade macaroni and cheese.

Then we feasted.

In “Julie and Julia,” Julie has a food critic over for dinner and can’t help but commit a culinary faux pas by complimenting her own handywork. After she takes a bite, she looks up at the critic and says “yum.”

Burkhalter and I couldn’t help it either.

n Tahlia Ganser can be reached at 360-416-2148 or at .

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ROASTED PUMPKIN STUFFED WITH BREAD AND CHEESE

WARNING: NOT FOR THE LACTOSE INTOLERANT OR CALORIE COUNTER

1 5-pound cooking pumpkin
1 1/2-pound loaf country-style bread
1 cup sour cream
6 ounces grated local cheese of your choice (Gruyere is recommended)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Salt and pepper

Rinse outside of pumpkin and wipe dry. Using a sharp knife and cutting with the tip of the knife angled down into the vegetable, cut off top of the pumpkin to create a “lid.” With a large spoon, scrape out seeds from inside the pumpkin.

Cut bread into thin slices and toast in oven until golden brown. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Line bottom of pumpkin cavity with one layer of bread. Layer on 4 tablespoons of sour cream, and some of the cheese, and a generous sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper. Continue layering (four layers in all), finishing with cheese on top. Set the top back on the pumpkin.

Cut a piece of aluminum foil large enough to wrap the entire pumpkin. Brush the pumpkin lightly with oil. Wrap pumpkin with foil and place on a baking pan. Set in oven and bake about 1 hour, 40 minutes. The pumpkin is done when skin has softened and a sharp knife can easily pierce through to the interior flesh.

Remove from oven, discard foil, and place pumpkin on a serving platter. Carefully remove lid and stir interior mixture, making sure to incorporate the pumpkin into the other ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.

• Originally clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle then adapted by Suzanne Butler, a culinary arts teacher at the Skagit Valley College and well-known Mount Vernon foodie. Also available at http://www.slowfoodskagit.org.