Butternut Squash Ravioli

Autumn-envy has set in, pretty hard. I'm seeing pictures of friends' fall foliage tours and pumpkin-spiced facebook status updates, and I'm starting to feel really homesick - New York is at its most beautiful now, I think, when the sky is impossibly blue and clear and everyone is wearing cardigans. Oh, man, do I miss cardigans, and layering clothing in general.  And Autumn is when you can still drink beers with your friends on decks and patios, but you don't get too sweaty when you ride your bike home. That Christmas carol has it totally wrong - this is the most wonderful time of the year. I mean, look at tomorrow's weather forecast for Brooklyn:

But I guess the grass is always greener - or the leaves are always more vibrantly red, yellow, and orange? Har.  One thing I associate with autumn, though, St. Kitts has in abundance: nutmeg. It's one of the few things that is produced locally.  A neat thing about the way nutmeg is sold here is that they don't remove the outer shell - that's mace, right? -before packaging. So it's a total deal, two spices in one. [edit: I was wrong, this is not mace. see Anna's comment below - what mace actually looks like is waaay more awesome.]

mace, brainy nutmeg

Winter squash is consistently available at the grocery stores, too - always calabaza, but sometimes there are other varieties. So I added a bunch of nutmeg to roasted and mashed butternut squash and used the leftover potsticker wrappers to make ravioli, fried some sage in browned butter and we sat next to the air conditioner and ate the hell out of it. It felt almost like Fall....but alas, definitely sweatier.

toaster roaster 

we roasted these too, uh huh.