Butternut Squash Noodle Kugel

I should start by confessing that I have no idea what a kugel is. I may have had a taste of one off of someone else's plate once or twice in my life. (I'm pretty sure it was here, actually.) So I have no grounds for asserting that what we made tonight was in fact a kugel.

However. I roasted two butternut squashes yesterday, and no one, myself included, seemed excited about eating them. Today I wanted to use them up, but I was also hoping for something ... light? Something un-squash-like?

I was Googling for "butternut squash souffles" when "butternut squash kugel" turned up. That seemed promising ...

But beware! It turns out that "kugel" can be a synonym for "casserole." I emphatically did not want to make baked squash in a pie pan. I wanted noodles. (In retrospect, here's the kind of kugel I dream about.)

What I ended up making was something like this recipe, with double the squash, some whole milk poured around the edges before baking, lots of fresh sage and rosemary, and dried cranberries and walnuts on top instead of pecans.

What I liked about it

1. It used up two whole butternut squashes.
2. The big chunks of fresh sage and rosemary (from our just-moved-indoors herb garden) made the whole thing seem lighter and fresher.
3. It had pretty colors! (Orange and green and cranberry.)

If I had it to do over, I would have

1. Blended the squash (instead of leaving it in chunks) with some milk to make it a smoother, saucier consistency.
2. Added some additional dairy -- cheese, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. (I was misled by some of the recipes I looked at being parve, containing neither milk nor meat).
3. Had some egg noodles instead of plain ziti. Relatedly, checked how many eggs we had. (I put in the three we had, but that wasn't anything custardy about it.)
4. Not burned the walnut and cranberry topping under the broiler. (The walnuts and cranberries pictured were added after the burned ones were removed.)

Worst Mom Ever

Let's start by saying that I'm pretty excited for the Somerville Winter Farmers Market tomorrow, because ... our forty pounds of squash? That I had in a cooler on the back porch? We'd eaten most of them, but some snow got in the cooler over the holidays, and when I checked it, there were three slightly molding kabocha squashes standing in four inches of water.

We rescued them and peeled and chopped the good parts, and so we had lots of squash puree in the refrigerator.

Simultaneously, I'd agreed to make a birthday cake for my housemate's six-year-old. I think you can guess where I'm going with this ... 

I did my due diligence and asked the Internet if there was such a thing as squash cake. But since the first recipe I found 1) used summer squash, and 2) used it raw and chopped instead of cooked and pureed, I decided to disregard all instruction. (Here's a recipe I found later that actually would have made sense for my ingredients.)

My plan, instead, was to make my standard carrot cake, substituting squash for carrots. That plan lasted until I realized that squash puree is completely unlike grated carrots. Vaguely recalling that some low-fat cake recipes substitute applesauce for vegetable oil, I substituted squash puree for the oil in the recipe.

Because when better to try an untested improvised low-fat vegetable-based cake than when you actually have the chance to ruin someone's birthday?

The cake came out extra moist and a little flatter than I would have liked, but certainly passable. (The frosting is leftover cinnamon cream cheese filling.)

The birthday girl didn't seem to mind, especially when distracted with her presents of pea shoots and spinach.

Butternut Blues

I know, I know, just a few weeks ago I was gung-ho about cooking squash, but when the reality of 30-degree-temperatures and dark at 4pm and no fresh green vegetables in the house started to set in ... I just wasn't feeling it. Seeing winter coming on and imagining the long months of orange soup after orange soup filled me with an overwhelming sense of ickiness.

Unfortunately, I'd also agreed to go to housemate Sara's church Hanukkah potluck at the last minute. And when I asked her what to bring, she said vegetables for 15 to 25 people ... and what we had in the house was more than 40 pounds of squash.

So, in search of inspired preparations, here's a selection of butternut squash recipes that seemed significantly different from the typical roast/soup/puree (mostly found via the inimitable Tastespotting):

Curried Butternut Squash with Brown Chickpeas (eCurry)
Butternut Gnocchi (My Easy Cooking)
Butternut Squash and Leek Latkes (Food & Style)
Roasted Butternut, Sausage, and Fennel Stuffing (Gimme Some Oven!)
Butternut Squash Orzo (We Are Not Martha)
Butternut Squash Risotto (A Beach Home Companion)
Butternut Squash Polenta (Epicurious)
Butternut Squash and Cheddar Bread Pudding (Epicurious)
Whole Wheat Butternut Waffles (How Sweet It Is)
Butternut Squash Fondue (Cooking Books)
Butternut Squash, Drunk Mushrooms, and Goat Cheese Napoleons (The Lonely Bean)
Butternut Squash and Brown Rice Porridge (Dog Hill Kitchen)
Shrimp with Butternut Squash in Coconut Sauce (Modern Comfort Food)
Butternut Squash and Cider Doughnuts (Art & Lemons)
Butternut Squash Butter (Art & Lemons)
Your Best Butternut Squash Recipes (Food52)

Of course, after all that, I only had half an hour to cook, so I ended up making the world's simplest squash puree after all. But as I saw the diners happily adding sunny orange glops of Vitamin A to their plates of latkes and brisket, I felt some measure of my joy in squash restored. And, as you see, they nearly licked the serving dish clean.

Squash Puree a la Running Late: Peel and seed squash and cut into small chunks. Boil (in barely enough water to cover) for 15 minutes or until very soft. Drain and transfer squash to food processor; process until very smooth. Stir in some butter and salt and pepper, and for gosh sake, try not to spill orange goop all over the subway while running for your train.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Farm Share Stories. May you have a delicious day!

(Our haul courtesy of Kimball Fruit Farm.)

Stuffed Baby Pumpkins

So, as promised, I fed the people the Halloween decorations.

Seven no-longer-seasonal baby pumpkins became seven gooey cheddar-mozzarella-and-challah-filled practice Thanksgiving appetizers. Win!

The recipe is basically Dorie Greenspan's Pumpkin Packed with Bread and Cheese, which seems to be all over the Internet right now (final version on Epicurious; NPR interview). I adapted it for baby pumpkins with some of the ideas here.

Squash Time!

The season of squash is upon us, and tonight's delicata squash rings (the skin is edible) are dedicated to all my indulgent roommates over the years, the ones who have enthusiastically signed off on a late November purchase of a 40-pound box of squash.

Guide to 23(!) types of winter squash
A shorter winter squash glossary
Butternut squash recipes on Food 52

Because there can never be too much squash, I'm also thinking of cooking the Halloween decorations: roasted baby pumpkins, baked miniature pumpkins, baby pumpkins stuffed with coconut vegetables.

Mom, maybe don't click, but here's some profane squash humor for the McSweeney's readers out there: "It's decorative gourd season." (Thanks, Ben!)

P.S. The New York Times is posting new vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes daily until T-day.

More Sauce to Your Leek

PISTOL: By this leek, I will most horribly revenge: I eat and eat, I swear--
FLUELLEN: Eat, I pray you: will you have some more sauce to your leek? there is not enough leek to swear by.
-- King Henry V, V.i

Oh my, what big leeks we had!

I didn't want to make a leek soup or anything where the leeks wouldn't be front and center, so I took a page from James Peterson's Vegetables (new to me, but highly recommended) and made something like his very simple leek gratin:

Halve the leeks in a baking dish, pour over a cup of heavy cream, add salt and pepper, and bake for 30 or 40 minutes.

Our lighter leek gratin had half a cup of light cream and half a cup of whole milk, actually.

(Can I digress for a moment? I decided this afternoon to go all old-school and look for a leek recipe in a book instead of on the Internet, and now I'm sorry. Our leeks were tasty, but just look at the sexier Jamie Oliver version of a leek gratin. And look at all the ideas on Epicurious! And on Ask Metafilter! And on TasteSpotting!)

Tuesday is our use-up-the-farm-share-vegetables day, so we served the leeks with roasted dinner: potatoes, butternut squash, apples, onions, and corn (all hacked into large pieces, tossed with oil and salt and pepper).

Summer-into-Fall Vegetable Chili

I came down with a nasty cold this weekend, to go with the decidedly fall-like weather, so it seemed like time to make a Giant Pot of Chili.

I like this chili because it takes lots and lots of whatever vegetables you have. (Maybe you're noticing a theme here?) Ours struck a nice-but-unplanned balance between late-summery farm share ingredients (fresh corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and celery from the CSA, as well as zucchini) and those more evocative of fall (butternut squash, carrots, onions).

The best chili is obviously the kind your mom makes, so I'm not going to tell you how to make it, except to say that I think a more-vegetables version is worth trying. (Our recipe is loosely based on Emeril's.) If you have strong feelings about what ingredients are allowed in a proper chili, you're welcome to call this vegetable stew. Or a ragout, if the queen's coming to dinner.

Because of a purchasing error, we didn't actually have any chili powder. (Note to self: giant bag labeled "chili powder" at the Indian market is pure powdered chiles -- something like our cayenne pepper -- not a great deal on the much milder American chili powder). I subcontracted the seasoning to Jack, who claims to have learned to cook by making chili, so all I can tell you is that authentic Farm Share Stories Chili features some combination of the ingredients pictured above (l-r: garlic powder, cocoa, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, apple cider, cayenne, garlic oil, cumin, liquid smoke, salt).

P.S. There is definitely leftover chili for today's food blogger potluck! Still time to RSVP!

Cambodian Vegetable Curry

Once again posed the problem of green beans and potatoes, we made a simplified, vegetarian version of this Cambodian vegetable and chicken curry.

Other farm share items tossed in: carrots, kale, sweet potato.

Non-farm-share additions: squash, peppers, tofu cubes.

Footnote on the Epicurious recipe: The recipe calls for making a paste of lemongrass and chiles (among other things) and then later adding jarred red curry paste. The red curry paste I use is made of lemongrass and chiles (among other things), so I think you can guess my shortcut.

More-Vegetable-Less-Cheese Macaroni and Cheese

We improvised this when we really just wanted mac & cheese for dinner but knew we needed to eat our vegetables.

We were too hungry/impatient to wait for sweet potatoes and squash to cook, so we cut them into very small pieces. To our pleasant surprise, that caused them to disappear into the sauce.

--

Boil a pound of pasta.

Meanwhile, in a giant saute pan, steam-saute your vegetables until very soft. We used one zucchini (largish dice), one sweet potato (finely grated), and one small butternut squash (cut into matchsticks). And we added some frozen edamame near the end of the cooking.

Also meanwhile, ask one of your housemates to make a cheese sauce. (Ours was a butter-flour roux, plus milk, plus a combination of bits of leftover fancy Christmas cheeses. Believe me, I wish I knew the exact recipe, too.)

While everything is still warm, vigorously stir together the pasta, vegetables, cheese sauce, and a big handful of arugula. Keep stirring until the squash and sweet potato are smashed into the sauce and the arugula is wilted.

Season to taste with salt, black pepper, and paprika.

(Inspired, sort of, by Mark Bittman's more-vegetable-less-egg frittata.)

Out with the Old ...

We ended 2009 by trying to eat down our accumulated vegetables, so I present Things You Would Never Think to Make If You Were Buying Ingredients at a Grocery Store, in two courses.

1. Squash-carrot-(avocado!?) soup

Just the latest in our long history of making large quantities of orange soup, this even-oranger-than-usual concoction included squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, giant garlic, and avocados. Non-CSA additions included a can of diced tomatoes, milk, curry powder, nutmeg, and a spoonful of Marmite.

Presumably there's a technique for making the soup, but I have to say this one was less rehearsed than usual.

Approximately: Cook the garlic in oil. Add squash and potato chunks and cook for a bit. Add grated carrots, tomatoes, canned tomatoes, water, and Marmite and cook until the vegetables are soft. Blend the soup a bit with an immersion blender, add avocados and milk to achieve desired consistency, and season to taste.

Makes an enormous amount of soup.

2. Stir-fried greens and ham

Our authentically vegetarian housemate is still out of town, so excuse the foray into carnivory.

Farm share items herein: Onion, green pepper, zucchini, basil, bunch of kale, bag of salad greens (I don't think normal people cook these, but I put them in at the very last minute to just wilt them a bit, and it reduces the volume a lot).

Non-CSA additions: Mushrooms and ham.

Brown the ham and mushrooms until the smoke detector goes off; set aside. Saute the onions, green pepper, and zucchini until just about cooked. Return the ham and mushrooms to the pan. Add the kale and a small amount of water, cover, and let steam until the kale is cooked. Add the basil and salad greens and steam for just a moment more. I seasoned with salt and pepper, red pepper flakes, and lemon juice.

Jack got a mandoline for his birthday (hi, Jack's mom!), so we did a beautiful mise en place with the onions, mushrooms, zucchini, and pepper very thinly sliced.

Fond of Fondue

I'd like to tell you that our descent into 1970s kitsch had to do with clearing lots of vegetables out of our fridge before the holiday. But honestly, it was more about (1) a shopping miscommunication that resulted in our having twice as much cheese as planned, and (2) the impracticality of returning the borrowed fondue pot with its base still full of methylated spirits.

We did eat lots of vegetables with it, though!

• broccoli (raw)
  
• snap peas (raw)
  
• green beans (raw)
  
• apples (cut into chunks, raw)
  
• butternut squash (cubed, roasted)
  
• sweet potatoes (cubed, roasted)
  
• potatoes (quartered, roasted)
  

The fondue is the cheddar tomato fondue from Epicurious, basically melted cheddar and half a can of diced tomatoes. (Some sous chefs were skeptical about the tomatoes right up to the point when they tasted it.)

Best visitor comment: "I don't know why we don't eat things you get to stab with a long fork more often."

Roasted Winter Vegetable Curry

Our usual solution for accumulated winter root vegetables is to peel and cube them and roast them all together (tossed with salt and oil, roasted at about 400 degrees for, say, 30 minutes for fairly small dice). This week we've been eating a mixture of squashes (butternut and delicata), turnips, beets, parsnips, carrots, and sweet potatoes we roasted on Monday.

Usually we eat our roasted vegetables plain (or seasoned with herbs/lime juice/cook's choice) as a side dish, but this week, Jack made the leftovers into a curry that proved immensely popular (and used the two underripe tomatoes we got in our box a couple weeks ago, to boot).

I'm told that the recipe is alarmingly simple:

• Dice the underripe tomatoes and cook them into submission in a large pan. Push them to the side of the pan.

• Fry a bunch of curry powder in the pan until fragrant. (Our house asserts that Indian spices taste better cooked--and cooking them certainly makes the kitchen smell like curry. If your lover doesn't like smelling curry in your hair hours later, adjust to taste.) Mix the curry powder with the tomato sauce.

• Add the mixed roasted vegetables.

• Add cream and coconut flakes (or coconut milk in place of both, if your kitchen is better stocked for Indian cooking than ours on a random Tuesday). Season to taste with salt, cayenne pepper, and additional curry powder to taste.

• Serve over rice.

(The chef speculates that you should use yogurt or something tangier than cream if your tomatoes are not underripe. Judging from the amenability of curry to the flavor of underripe tomatoes, he also speculates, correctly, that there must exist some kind of green tomato curry.)

Again, apologies for limited posting: December has been more about travel than home cooking. I've been enjoying childhood favorites and Midwestern specialties like green Jello salad (with mini marshmallows and canned fruit cocktail), which underscored just how much my eating habits have changed since I've moved to Boston (much less started subscribing to a CSA and living in a co-op). Now when I read a blog post about someone buying 80 bunches of kale, I'm not like, "how weird," but instead, "hey, I know that guy."

Winter Vegetable Pizza

With no CSA pickup last week, and all of us having had our Thanksgiving dinners elsewhere, we were feeling a little Old Mother Hubbard about what food we had in the house. Thank goodness for storage vegetables!

On top of a basic pizza dough, we layered

• Garlic sauteed in olive oil
• Caramelized onions
• Roasted potato and sweet potato cubes
• Roasted thinly sliced beets
• Roasted acorn squash cubes
• Seared mushrooms
• Cheese sauce (flour-butter roux + milk + miscellaneous cheeses)

After cooking (and a minute under the broiler to brown the cheese sauce), we topped it with arugula and goat cheese.

Mix-and-Match a Minestrone

Minestrone fulfills two of my major cooking needs: 1) you can make it entirely from ingredients you already have and 2) it doesn't require a recipe.

As long as there are some kind of tomatoes in the house, I will attempt to make minestrone. (And I haven't tried it yet, but I am not 100 percent sure that ketchup does not count as tomatoes.)

1. Cook your aromatics (any combination of onions, shallots, leeks, celery, and carrots) in oil in a large pot.

2. Add long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, turnips, parsnips).

3. Add some kind of tomatoes (fresh, canned, paste, jarred pasta sauce) and some kind of broth (from a can, box, cubes, or even just water).

4. Add quick-cooking vegetables (zucchini, corn, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards).

5. Add starches (cooked beans, cooked barley, uncooked rice, uncooked pasta).

The trick is really just to add the ingredients in approximate order of how much cooking time they need, so everything gets done at the same time.

Add whatever seasonings you like (I totally phoned it in this time with a jar of "Italian seasoning") and salt and pepper. Serve with grated cheese (traditionally Parmesan) on top.

This particular incarnation was leeks + celery + carrots + purple potatoes + butternut squash + canned chopped tomatoes + vegetable broth + cabbage + white beans + barley, and it made a serious dent in accumulated CSA vegetables.

(If fast and loose is not for you, here is a very serious approach to minestrone making, with beautiful photos.)

Postcolonial Squash Soup

Our contribution to the squashluck was something like vichyssoise (an invented-in-America French-style potato-leek soup) and something like a very inauthentic curry (Indian seasonings), as if the Brits and the Americans got into a battle of borrowed cuisines in my kitchen, motivated by the goal of using every vegetable in our refrigerator.

The recipe goes something like this:

Peel and cube a whole bunch of butternut squash and roast it in the oven.

Meanwhile, saute four or five thinly sliced leeks and some minced garlic in olive oil in a large stockpot. Add diced potatoes and cook until potatoes are slightly browned.

Add grated ginger and a couple tablespoons of garam masala and fry for just a minute. (I'm not entirely convinced that frying dry spices is essential to any dish, but I always do it when I cook Indian food because the smell is incredible.)

Add broth (we use vegetable bouillon cubes dissolved in hot water) to cover by a few inches, bring to a boil, and cook soup, covered, until potatoes are almost completely softened.

Add the roasted squash cubes to the soup, along with milk (our choice), cream, broth, or water to cover. Stir well, bring back to a boil, then blend soup with an immersion blender or in a blender, press it through a food mill, or just mash it with a fork or potato masher. Add more liquid to adjust the consistency if desired.

Add a generous amount of grated carrot to the soup and allow it to cook for a few minutes longer. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Squashluck

Our co-op likes to entertain, so we celebrated fall with a squashluck.

(I wish I could tell you that our squash windfall came entirely from the farmshare, but we actually had to lay in extra supplies. One of my favorite things about cooperative living: buying forty pounds of squash seems like a reasonable thing to do.)

Our guests turned up with some impressive dishes.

1. Stuffed acorn squash with cheese and apples
2. Stuffed acorn squash with cranberries and walnuts
3. Risotto with pumpkin and pancetta
4. Squash bread (gluten-free) with pumpkin butter
5. Pumpkin rum drink
6. Roasted pumpkin stuffed with ground beef
7. Squash filled with applesauce
8. Roasted squash seeds
9. Postcolonial squash soup (recipe to come)

And I didn't get a picture, but dessert was a triumph: pumpkin mousse and chocolate mousse parfaits.

Thursday Veggietrivia

Crows in the Kitchen recently made the lemon-barley pilaf that was our second choice for an Epicurious barley recipe.

The Globe’s most-emailed article yesterday was a pretty good looking recipe for a butternut squash crumble.

As we like to think of ourselves as exemplary farm share members, I am a bit shamefaced to admit that we missed picking up our share two weeks ago. On the bright side: a week of eating supermarket vegetables really got us on the ball about sending in the deposit for our winter share.

Squash-Apple Improv

Liz told us she had in mind a dish of squash and apples, topped with walnuts and cheese, then left us alone in the kitchen. This is what we came up with.

(Turns out she actually meant zucchini when she said "squash," but we didn't hear any complaints.)


Squash and Apples with Wild Rice

1 large butternut squash, peeled and cubed (reserve seeds)
2 medium apples, cored and cubed
1 large onion, chopped
Baby spinach (or other greens), chopped

Cider-Butter Sauce
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) butter
1 cup apple cider
1/2 cup cooking wine
Sage
Allspice

Toss the squash seeds with a little oil and salt and toast in the oven or under the broiler. Set aside.

Roast the squash in the oven until nearly completely cooked. Add the apples near the end of the cooking time and roast until slightly softened.

Meanwhile, make the sauce. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the cider and wine, bring to a boil, and season with sage and allspice. Remove from heat.

Saute the onion in a large pan until transparent. Add the roasted squash and apples and the spinach, pour the sauce over, and cook just until the spinach is wilted and the mixture is warm through. Stir in the toasted squash seeds. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over wild rice and add garnishes.

Wild Rice
Prepare wild rice according to the package directions. Or, if you are us, realize that you have tiny bits of three kinds of wild and brown rice that, made together, will be almost enough rice. We added salt and a splash of apple cider for flavor.

Garnishes
Walnuts: Toss about 1 cup walnut halves with maple syrup and coarse salt and toast in the oven or under the broiler. Chop up about half the walnuts and stir into the squash mixture; use the rest whole for garnish.

Goat cheese: Top bowls of squash and wild rice with a spoonful of goat cheese.

Squash * Squash * Squash

We are adventurous squash eaters around here (I bought 40 pounds of squash one day last winter; we are planning a squash-themed potluck next week; we have tried -- and liked -- squash lattes), but since we hit on this recipe, we haven't been eating our squash any other way.

A butternut squash is quite nice
If it's peeled and cut in small dice,
Add some butter and cayenne,
And roast it all in a pan
(Twenty minutes or so will suffice).

Actually, this works with any kind of squash. Peel it and chop it into 3/4-inch chunks. Melt some butter (about 1/2 stick for a medium butternut squash), and stir in 2 or 3 tablespoons of honey. Add a few teaspoons of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg, and up to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper.

The small dice are key to this treat
With its seasonings savory and sweet.
I hope math doesn't scare ya,
'Cause it's about surface area,
The more sides, the more butter you eat.

Toss the squash cubes with the butter mixture and spread out on a cookie sheet. Add salt to taste. Roast at 400 degrees for 20 to 30 minutes. (If the squash cubes are sticking or burning, you can add a little water.) Once the squash is cooked, put it under the broiler for 1 or 2 minutes, until the tips are a little crispy.