TracyFood

Winter Squash 103: toasting the seeds. 28 February 2008 12:22 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, ingredients, pictures, seasonality, vegan, vegetarian, winter squash , trackback

February is never my favorite time of year, but it’s especially rough in Oregon, where most of the winter looks like the very worst kind of February weather to me — not super-cold, just grey and dark and rainy. There’s usually a nice week in the middle of the month, when the sun comes out and I get my hopes up that winter is over and I can go back to playing in my garden. That week is almost invariably followed by at least a month of meteorological misery (sometimes it even snows on my poor little sproutlings). Not so this year. It’s been a remarkably sunny February, and I’m a little suspicious, like Oregon is trying to lure me into a false sense of security so it can destroy me with hail. I’ve been trying to resist overconfidence, but March is almost here…

All of which is to say that if I want to write about winter squash, I had better hurry up and do it while there’s still a hint of the appropriate season. So. In my previous posts about winter squash, I’ve been pretty casual about the seeds: cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds with a spoon, and hope they don’t all sprout and take over your compost pile. But if you’ve got a little extra time (like if your squash is roasting for a while), you can roast these seeds and eat them! Yay!

I’m not going to claim this isn’t messy, but I maintain that’s part of the fun. You start with the squash guts:

and you pick out the seeds, which will be pretty slimy and probably could use a rinse:

They look like pumpkin seeds because pumpkin is a kind of squash (and is in fact synonymous with squash in some dialects of English)!

Meanwhile, coat a small skillet (it doesn’t have to be cast iron or even nonstick) with a thin layer of oil, and warm it over medium-high heat until you can feel the warmth when you hold your hand 6-8 inches over the pan. Then put in the seeds. You can dry them on towels if you want, but I usually skip that step and get lots of splatter action. (Um, there is a chance your seeds will try to make like popcorn, so you might want/need to cover the pan.)

Your seeds are toasted when they are golden brown and fragrant. You can season them simply, with just salt, or branch out into pepper, spices, or a little soy sauce or hot sauce, which is what I did with the ones used for topping Thai-spiced Pumpkin Soup by Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks, pictured below.

I find the biggest challenge is resisting the seeds long enough to use them as a soup topping, but they’re a great tide-me-over snack while I’m waiting for another squash-based dish to be done. Yum!