TracyFood

How to cook a giant mystery squash (only very arguably a recipe) 23 August 2007 11:29 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, eugene, garden, kitchen gear, local food, pictures, recipes, summer , trackback

Step one is to make a silly blog post about a ridiculous stray squash that followed your partner home from a pile marked “FREE” by the side of the road somewhere, no joke. (And now I will stop saying “you” when I mean “me” because it’s confusing as heck to write and I’m up past my bedtime after a long day that involved bringing my mom to work, also no joke, but I may write about it eventually.)

The day after I made the silly blog post that essentially committed me to cooking the supersquash, I started out by weighing it, just for the record. Turns out we’re talking 5 pounds, 14.5 ounces of overgrown mystery cucurbit here, people (2.678 kilograms if you like it metric). It is way, way too big to fit on any cutting board found in my kitchen. So step two is to cut the dang thing in half just so there’s pieces that are slightly more reasonable to work with. Then I cut one of those chunks in half lengthwise like I might with any other squash, to have a flat surface I could put it down on for further chopping, or expose the seeds for scooping out. In the case of mystery squash, the latter strategy seemed very appropriate:

I mean, check out those seeds. You know exactly what that spoon is for, oh yes. After scooping out the guts, a closer look at the non-seedy flesh of the squash revealed a texture not unlike that of spaghetti squash, which gave me the idea of steaming a piece, just to see if the flesh would form strands in a similar manner. I put it in a baking dish (7 x 11 inches, maybe 2 or 3 inches deep) with a little water, covered it all with plastic wrap, and microwaved the whole mess for three minutes. After that, I broke out a fork, and:

Holy crap. That was not supposed to work! I was just curious and had a couple of three or four extra pounds of squash to play with. Unfortunately the stringy cooked squash flesh didn’t taste like much of anything, so the last step of this recipe is: feed the giant mutant hybrid squash to your compost pile, and make something else for dinner (that meal is almost written up but I’m saving it for tomorrow). Had the mystery stringy flesh turned out to be tasty, instead of a pretty tasteless mess somewhere between spaghetti squash and crookneck summer squash, I might have gone all tempeh marinara on its ass (despite its anatomical lack thereof).

Ask me if thanks to this experience/experiment I’m entirely terrified (all over again) just thinking about the cucumber-spaghetti squash hybrids in my garden! (Answer: oh hell yes.)