Fall is In the Air
By Margit Bisztray, Food Critic

Raise your hand if you have a centerpiece of gourds, pumpkins and Indian corn on your dining room table? It's that time of year again!

I just returned from a trip to Toronto, where my father lives, and where our family goes to celebrate his birthday and autumn for a few days each October. I don't miss the northern cold weather I grew up with, but I do miss those rare, crystalline days where the edges of every leaf seems to snap, and the sky is a dazzling blue and the forests are every shade of warm hue. But when it gets muddy and brown and icky as it inevitably does in November, I'm glad I'm back here in Florida, ha!

In Toronto, we have a tradition of going to an apple orchard, where there are some fifty kinds of apples bending down the tree boughs, and you walk the long rows trying to figure out which one is your favorite, one bite at a time. There is also a pumpkin patch at this farm. Once the green vines die off, a pumpkin patch becomes a sea of orange heads on a naked brown canvas. It's really something to see. Pretty weird-looking actually, especially if you've ever watched Sleepy Hollow. You can actually walk on them, pumpkin to pumpkin, like rocks over a river.

This farm offers hayrides, a hay bale labyrinth, and pick your own apples $17 a bushel. When you leave a place like that, you leave with a "harvest" feeling no cornucopia centerpiece can replicate. It's my fall fix every year, but even though I was only gone five days, the air in Key West was just a little bit different when I got back. It has just the slightest hint of coolness. Not "cool" but also not that heat that feels like drowning, either. It's fall, sub-tropic-island-style. It goes hand-in-hand with the making of the Fantasy Fest floats and the reopening of restaurants that close for an October break, and the opening of stone crab season, which is right around the corner.

Hey, did you know that seeds from pumpkin plants have been found in Mexico dating back to 7000 B.C.? And that the origin of the pumpkin pie is that colonists sliced off the pumpkin top, removed the seeds, filled the insides with milk, spices and honey and baked it in hot ashes? Think of these interesting facts, and a barren field spotted with orange orbs, and aisles of heavy apple trees next time you gaze at your autumnal centerpiece. Happy Fall!

NOTE: Margit Bisztray has been reviewing restaurants and writing about food for ten years. She has published three editions of The Complete Key West Dining Guide, and her work has appeared in such publications as Vogue, Gourmet, Islands and Metropolitan Home. To read more restaurant reviews, log your own personal opinions, rate your favorite restaurants and watch streaming video archives of these shows and other reviews, visit Margit's Top 5.