TracyFood

Winter Squash 102: enough prepping, let’s roast (and eat)! 8 February 2008 6:31 pm

Posted by Tracy in : advice,cooking,eating,ingredients,soup,vegan,vegetarian,winter squash , trackback

In Winter Squash 101, I described the process of cutting a winter squash into bite-size pieces suitable for a recipe like Gladys’s Rice and Bean Stew, and even illustrated the process with pictures of my wrangling an acorn squash for similar purposes. But that’s not all you can do with winter squash, oh no, and many of the alternatives are even more fun and easy. Take roasting, for example.

What’s great about roasting winter squash is that the prep is way fun and easy. Once you’ve gotten your winter squash (an acorn, in this example) to the halved and gutted point, like so:

you simply coat the flesh with oil or butter and bake it until the flesh is tender (where tender is defined as “it’s easy to insert and remove a paring knife or fork” or “yields when you pick it up with tongs or poke it with a finger if you’ve got cook hands”). I’ll get a little more detailed about the baking later on, but for now the important thing to notice is that you didn’t have to do all the cutting and peeling described in Winter Squash 101! Yay! Also, if you’re like me, when the squash is done, you can take it out of the oven and eat the flesh right out of the rind with a fork or spoon and more butter and maybe a little brown sugar or maple syrup (which I happen to have in abundance right now, yay hooray!) So awesome.

Even if you’re not enough of a squash fanatic to eat it on the half shell (so to speak), I still recommend having a spoonful just to explore the tastes and textures of different squashes. In my experience, acorn is the juiciest but can be a little stringy sometimes, delicata and sweet dumpling have a more tender mouthfeel, and I’m pretty sure butternut gets its name from the fact that it can be rich and creamy all on its delicious own (correct me if I’m wrong, but I know the truth in my heart).

Roasted squash flesh is easily scooped out of its shell (don’t burn your fingers — let it cool down first!), and can be mashed or pureed like potatoes for a tasty vegetable side dish, or blended into delicious soups like my own Cocobutternut or its slightly fancier cousin, Thai-spiced Pumpkin Soup by Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks, pictured below.

The toasted seeds on there are from the very same squash used in the body of the soup — while the squash were roasting, I had plenty of time to pick the seeds out of the squash innards and give them a rinse and a toast with some spices. Yum. Which is another great feature of roasted winter squash: once they’re in the oven, you’re free to assemble the rest of your meal. Best of all, roasting isn’t just for acorn squash, oh no:

That’s a mix with acorn in the back left, sweet dumpling in front of that, and butternut all over the right, back to front.

Squash are pretty forgiving about oven temperatures, so you could even bake something else at the same time you’re roasting, provided its recipe doesn’t call for anything super-extreme (I’ve baked squashes from anywhere between 300 and 400 degrees F, with longer times for lower temperatures). Baking times will vary depending on the size of the squash you’re using. Delicatas and sweet dumplings could be done in as little as 20 minutes, but acorns, butternuts, and pumpkins could take twice as long.

Spaghetti squash are the exception to all these recommendations, and I’ll have to write them up some other time. For now, happy squashing and have a great weekend!

http://soy.dyndns.org/comics Penny

Are sweet dumplings also called carnival squash?

I have to figure something to do with the acorn I got from my organic delivery in the not too distant future if only because it is taking up room in my fridge, and I’m kind of burned out on acorn. If you have good thoughts, I’d appreciate them.
Jen

you should try roasting squash with maple syrup in it. :) it’s really good. yum.
http://www.tracyfood.com Tracy

Sweet dumplings are different from carnival squash — for one thing, they’re much smaller, like I could probably eat one all by myself if I didn’t want to eat anything but squash at that meal. (Also, I totally cheated and Googled both kinds of squash to make sure I wasn’t making everything up). I would totally make the rice and bean stew with that acorn, or maybe dice it up into a winter minestrone. If you’re really truly burned out on squash and there’s more room in your freezer than the fridge, you can always clean and peel and cut it up and freeze it for later use when you’re more in the mood. But what the heck is a winter squash doing in your fridge, anyway? I’ve always stored them at room temperature, like potatoes and garlic and so on (though I wish I had a darker spot for the spuds to keep them from sprouting).
http://soy.dyndns.org/comics Penny

The winter squash is in my fridge cause I’ve had a lot of vegetables that normally store okay at room temperature go bad in my apartment, like onions almost always do if I don’t use them right away, and potatoes do that a bit too.
http://www.tracyfood.com Tracy

Remind me to give your kitchen a serious talking-to next time I visit. Letting veggies go bad is not cool at all.
http://soy.dyndns.org/comics Penny

You know…. I keep trying to explain. And it doesn’t listen, so I use the fridge. The fridge loves me. It doesn’t let my sweet potatoes send up shoots, which the kitchen is doing. That might be my fault for exposing it to light, though.