Nutella Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread

October in Nashville. The month where the trees along Gallatin Pike turn yellow and orange (Elijah's favorite month, naturally — "the TREES are orange, Mama, the TREES" — the boy sees the whole world confirming his aesthetic choices) and the air smells like woodsmoke and the restaurant shifts into its coziest gear. October is soup-and-bread season. October is when the lunch crowd lingers because the room is warm and the food is warm and the leaving means going back into the cold and nobody wants to go back into the cold when there's cornbread.

The Instagram crossed 2,000 followers this week. Two thousand. Chloe showed me the number on her phone with the specific pride of a teenager who has built something and wants acknowledgment but doesn't want to seem like she wants acknowledgment. "It's just a number," she said, in the tone of a person who absolutely does not think it's just a number. Two thousand people following Sarah's Table. Two thousand people watching the food that started in Earline's kitchen in Alabama and traveled through Lorraine's hands in Antioch and arrived in my restaurant on Gallatin Pike and is now being photographed by a thirteen-year-old with a DSLR and a talent for making cornbread look like a sunset. Two thousand. The number is not just a number. The number is an audience. The number is: people are paying attention.

Halloween planning. The restaurant is doing a Halloween special — Chloe's idea: "spooky" cornbread (regular cornbread with black food coloring, which is horrifying to look at and tastes exactly the same, because the cornbread doesn't care what color it is), pumpkin soup (a variation on Chloe's sweet potato soup, swapping pumpkin for sweet potato, because Chloe looked at me and said "it's the same technique, Mama, just different squash" and she's right and the rightness is terrifying because she's thirteen and she understands flavor profiles better than most adults). And James is smoking a pork shoulder that he's calling "The Monster" because it's eighteen pounds and he says it looks like a horror movie prop before it goes in the smoker.

Jayden is writing a Halloween story. Not for school — for the reading corner. He wants to put a Halloween story on the restaurant bookshelf for the kids who come in during October. The story is about a fire truck that comes alive on Halloween night and drives itself through Nashville putting out haunted fires. The fire truck's name is "Blaze" (the same name as the cat, the same name as everything Jayden loves). I read the first two pages. The writing is good. Not ten-year-old good — just good. Clear, vivid, the kind of writing that makes you see the fire truck driving down Broadway with its lights flashing and the ghosts getting out of the way because even ghosts respect a fire truck. The boy has his mama's voice. The boy tells stories. The boy is going to be either a firefighter or a writer or both and I will support every version of his future.

Elijah's Halloween costume: a traffic cone. Not a firefighter, not a superhero, not a character from a movie. A traffic cone. An orange cone. The boy wants to be an ORANGE CONE for Halloween. I asked him why. He said: "Because it's the most orange thing." Because it's the most orange thing. The logic is flawless. The logic is five years old. The costume is: an orange felt cone that Lorraine is sewing because Lorraine can sew anything and a grandmother will sew a traffic cone costume for her grandchild without question because that is what grandmothers do. Lorraine on the phone: "The boy wants to be a CONE?" The boy wants to be a cone. The cone is: peak Elijah. The cone is: perfection.

Dinner: roasted butternut squash with brown butter and sage. Fall on a plate. The dish that tastes like October and smells like the restaurant on a good day and is orange, which means Elijah ate every bite without being asked. The orange strategy: working. Always working.

After a week of pumpkin soup tests in the restaurant kitchen and a five-year-old who will eat anything orange on principle, I needed a bake that carried the same October warmth home. This Nutella Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread is exactly that — the pumpkin keeps it moist and golden, the Nutella swirl makes it feel like a treat, and the chocolate chips are just Elijah’s tax on everything that comes out of this kitchen. It’s the kind of loaf that sits on the counter and disappears before you’ve decided whether to slice it properly.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 60 min | Total Time: 1 hr 15 min | Servings: 10 slices

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/3 cup Nutella, slightly warmed

Instructions

Preheat oven. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan with butter or non-stick spray and set aside.
Mix dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves until evenly combined.
Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin puree, granulated sugar, brown sugar, eggs, vegetable oil, milk, and vanilla extract until smooth.
Combine. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently with a spatula until just combined — do not overmix. Fold in the chocolate chips.
Add the Nutella swirl. Pour half the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Drop half the Nutella in spoonfuls over the batter. Add the remaining batter, then drop the rest of the Nutella on top. Use a butter knife or skewer to swirl the Nutella through the batter in gentle figure-eight motions.
Bake. Bake for 55—65 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs. If the top browns too quickly, tent loosely with foil after 40 minutes.
Cool and slice. Let the bread cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing. (It slices much cleaner once fully cooled — if you can wait that long.)

Nutrition (per serving)

Nutella Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread — The Orange Thing Elijah Would Absolutely Eat