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Frontera’s new Chipotle Pumpkin Salsa was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America as food editor Sara Moulton ran down the best new products at the 2010 Fancy Food show in New York. Sara and hosts Elizabeth Vargas and George Stephanopoulos loved the smoky, spicy flavor (but we notice Sara incorrectly identified sweet potato as one of the ingredients).

Perfect for autmun entertaining, this exciting seasonal recipe from the kitchen of Chef Rick Bayless is a delicious combination of velvety pumpkin and tangy roasted tomatillos with the sweet-smoky glow of chipotle chiles. It’s a limited edition product, so look for it on grocery store shelves this fall, and be sure to stock up — it won’t be around for long.

Watch the clip on abcnews.com >

My Dad has had more careers than anyone I know—he was a bricklayer in his early twenties and regularly points out the buildings around Chicago that he helped construct. For most of my childhood, he was a commercial artist creating charts and graphs for business meetings long before the computer age. But the job that gave him fodder for his best stories were his years in a local butcher shop.  His fingertips received so many nicks and cuts that they are now impervious to heat—allowing him to flip a spicy Hungarian sausage on the grill with his bare hands.

My father and his brothers still make that aforementioned pork sausage by hand for the annual family picnic. While stuffing 150 pounds of garlic and allspice seasoned pork into natural hog casings, they wax rhapsodic about the pork of years gone by—rich, tender and super moist. They reminisce about their mother’s cooking, their own father’s basement smokehouse filled with homemade hams and bacon while churning the sausage grinder.  They tell the next generation in attendance that today’s ground pork must be fortified with extra pork fat to render the sausages juicy when cooked over coals.

Which got us thinking. Serving the old guys pork on Father’s Day is a no-brainer. But how to make the ubiquitous pork chop memorable?  And with today’s leaner chops, how do we maintain juiciness? Bacon. That’s our answer for moist, flavorful pork chops (and many other kitchen conundrums). Thick, smoky bacon, emitting its goodness over and around a thick chop. Oh—and a generous basting of smoky spicy, barbecue sauce. Take that Dad and add it to your collection of tales.

We’ve been cooking like crazy around here all month getting ready for a mess of parties. First, we’ll host Saint Patrick’s Day for an open-house with the neighbors. The corned beef is already cooked—just waiting to be glazed and sliced. The beer is cold, too and the avocados are ripening as we speak.

Then, we’re anxiously looking forward to watching a bevy of college basketball games. We like to root for the underdogs.  Our brackets lean towards food and beverage playoffs—you know guacamole with tomatillo salsa versus hot cheese-beer dip. The winner goes to the next round for second helpings.

Tell us what you’re cooking as we await winners and warmer weather.  We may want to put the idea in our brackets.