For over 15 years, I have volunteered at the Winthrop Food Pantry. With a little cart, I take people around so that they can make their food choices, and I get to talk about food and recipes for 2 or 3 hours. For a foodie, it doesn’t get much better when it comes to volunteering.

The food pantry has its share of cookies and sugary things, but it is also chock-full of fresh fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes, potatoes, apples, cauliflower, onions, and oranges. The food pantry recipients are thrilled to have so many healthy choices.

Now, I know this flies in the face of the common conception about how food pantry recipients like to cook and eat—quick, cheap, and processed—but in Winthrop, at least, this simply isn’t true. In Winthrop, people cook. I’ve also heard comments such as, “Well, maybe the older recipients can cook, but I bet the younger ones can’t.” Again, not true. Younger men and women as well older ones go through the pantry with a keen eye of what will go with what. It is true that the food pantry recipients tend to be plain cooks and must sometimes be coaxed to try new things, but there is nothing wrong with being a plain cook.

Last Thursday, at the food pantry, one young woman told me, “I can make chili with these dried kidney beans, canned tomatoes, and the onion.”

Another woman, this one older, said, “I have a stockpile so that we always have the ingredients for something good to eat.”

Words to warm my heart.

Right now, left over from the holidays, the food pantry has a huge supply of canned pumpkin, and JoEllen, the executive director, has included copies of pumpkin recipes alongside the cans of pumpkins. One recipe is for pumpkin cake and the other is for a chili made with pumpkin.

“This looks really good,” I said, taking a copy of the pumpkin cake recipe for myself. (I also took the pumpkin chili recipe.)

“It does,” said the woman I was helping. She, too, took a recipe for the cake. “I guess I’d better have a can of pumpkin, then, and try making this.”

In my very own home pantry, I had a can of pumpkin pie mix, waiting to be used, and the next day I made the cake. As is usual with me, I fiddled a bit with the recipe, enough so that I can, with a clear conscience, call it my own and include it here.

I was very pleased with the results, so pleased that I will be making this cake again sometime soon. The pumpkin cake is easy to mix up, and it is moist, spicy, and delicious. The recipe doesn’t call for a butter-cream frosting, but let’s face it, cake is always better with frosting, and I made one for this pumpkin cake.

But the true test of this cake’s deliciousness came when I brought some of it to a gathering I went to on Saturday. One of my friends, Peggy, took a bite and said, “This cake is to die for.”

Oh, that made me feel good, especially as Peggy is a foodie, too. And best of all, this cake is a great keeper, maintaining its moist texture days and days after it was baked. (I really dislike dry cake.)

So dig out that can of pumpkin you still have from the holidays, and bake yourself a late-winter treat.

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