Monkey Monday: winter squash goodness and more. 2 November 2009 9:47 am
Posted by Tracy in : Harold McGee,books,cooking,eating,fangirl,health at every size,kitchen mishaps,monkeys,nyc,reading,seasonality,winter squash , trackbackFun fact! In some dialects of English (but not mine), the word “pumpkin” is used to refer to all winter squash, not just the orange hard-skinned kinds used to make pies and jack-o-lanterns (and other tasty things, some of which I will be describing later in this post). In my experience, this is mostly a Southern Hemisphere/British usage, but I welcome a more substantial analysis than my touchy-feely “I think this is how it works.” Meanwhile, in this Northern Hemisphere, between Halloween and the end of Daylight Savings Time it’s officially winter in my brain, and for the past week or so I have been marking the changing season by eating lots of winter squash, including pumpkin. Yum.
For starters, last Sunday night Peter and I had dinner at the newly reopened Community Food and Juice and it was fabulous. I had butternut squash and pumpkin ravioli (in sage brown butter and topped with pumpkin seeds, om nom nom) and for dessert Peter very kindly let me share his pumpkin crème brûlée, which was AMAZING. Then on Thursday night I wrangled an acorn squash into Gladys’s Rice and Bean Stew, substituting pinto beans for cannellini, and the leftovers will make for excellent instant food early this week, yum. Then on Halloween, we got a little pumpkin crazy.
First, Peter was kind enough to indulge my need to try Shake Shack‘s pumpkin spice frozen custard (one of their seasonal flavors for October, so I just had to take that last chance before it got replaced by some other deliciousness). Then, we went home by way of Fairway, for ingredients for pumpkin cheesecake. (Yes, we spent the holiday night at home, baking, because we are profoundly, awesomely boring people.) The recipe called for a 9-inch springform pan; thinking that ours was a 12-incher, we expanded it by a factor of 1.8… only to find out that the pan was 10 inches when it came time to fill it. Surprise! Luckily, we had enough ramekins to bake the remaining custard, two of which became a fabulous breakfast yesterday (we shared the last one this morning).
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Side note: I consulted Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking in an effort to figure out how to substitute cider vinegar for lemon juice, and then I read the bits about cheesecake because hey, why not? And then I realized: this is one of those books that’s even better for having met the author. Yay!
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Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes. Winter squash. I even managed to find some in our dim sum yesterday afternoon, which was unexpected but awesome. And some time later this week, maybe, I will be making butternut squash risotto to use up what I described on Twitter as “the by-now definitely undrinkable white wine left over from my birthday.” (For now, there’s still that leftover rice and bean stew, and two pots of squash-and-rice concoctions in the fridge would be too many.)
And now I must reluctantly return to reading The World Is Fat, with which I am not having the easiest time, oh no. Suffice it to say it makes me really appreciate yesterday’s Foxtrot comic, which is pretty much a perfect satire of the “calories in, calories out” model of metabolism. Repeat it with me, kids: the body is not a bomb calorimeter. Ahhh. That’s better.
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Peter
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Chiara
