I’ve only just realized that Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow. Oops!

I intended to do something special for Thanksgiving—like, invite people over, roast a bunch of stuff, make a pie—but we have band practice on Thursday, and after playing bass in the basement for three hours, I doubt I’m really going to be up for cooking a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m certainly not going to have the energy levels to entertain other people. So I’ll probably wind up having a Thanksgiving takeaway. Yay.

Though maybe I shouldn’t write off that pie-making just yet. I got a pleasant surprise in Waitrose the other day: as I was skulking around the baking aisle, I spotted a can of Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin.

Now, I’m all for making things from scratch, but the one time I tried to make pumpkin pie entirely from scratch, it was…less than successful. I couldn’t find canned pumpkin at the time, so I think I tried boiling fresh pumpkin and then draining it and mashing it (why I didn’t roast it I don’t know—it was right after we moved from Germany, where we had no proper oven, so maybe I hadn’t gotten the hang of the roasting thing yet).

Anyway, the pumpkin turned out soggy and tasteless, and the pie turned out pretty much the same way. Jeremy and the friends we had invited to dinner ate it without complaint, but I couldn’t even finish my piece. Devastated by my defeat, I haven’t tried to make pumpkin pie since.

But this canned pumpkin could change everything. The vast majority of proper American recipes for pumpkin pie—including the one in my beloved Mormon cookbook—call for canned pumpkin. There’s no shame in canned pumpkin. So, gosh darn it, the next time I’m in Waitrose, I’m going to nab some of that canned pumpkin and get down to baking.

Not that I’m really that crazy about pumpkin pie. But it is Thanksgiving, after all.