From time to time, Chow Bella's contributors challenge one another to a showdown: Make the best dish you can, using one common ingredient. This time (naturally), it was pumpkin. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing the results, and at the end, we'll let you know who won.

Today: resident bartender and Guilty Pleasures columnist JK Grence.

I was excited to hear about another Chow Bella showdown. I love getting to play around in the kitchen and come up with something new. For the pumpkin challenge, I figured that there would be tons of sweet dishes. So, I decided to take the savory route.

I'm going to let you in on one of my favorite ways to play with my food. It's a little website called Foodpairing. Some Belgian scientists realized that foods that have similar flavor compounds in them tend to pair together well. They put foods in gas chromatography to find out the flavor compounds. The result of their efforts is the Foodpairing website.