veg

food : butternut sage orzo

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After searching high and low, I was able to find orzo at Whole Foods. Good to know for the future. For folks like me for whom cream is just a big no-no, orzo is the gift that allows us to have something resembling risotto. Which is what the Butternut Sage Orzo dish is. (Note: this version of the recipe omits the instructions to add the sage to simmer with the squash if you are using dried rather than fresh herb.)

It’s likely that this dish was meant to be more of a pasta dish, in the sense that the squash chunks would remain whole and be tossed with the orzo. I wanted a risotto impersonation, however, so I used my handy potato masher to mash the squash toward the end of the cooking time and create a nice thick soupy sauce to be mixed in with the orzo. It was delicious! After our experience with the Winter Squash Galette, I was pretty confident that the dish would be great, as it had the same winning combination of sage and parmesan cheese (pecorino again, in my case). I didn’t take any pictures, but I’m sure you can imagine: it looked like a warm bowl of yummy squash and orzo with sage!

There is really not much else to say about this dish or squash. Except that I still have three pumpkins, one butternut squash, and one spaghetti squash hanging about, as well as something like two quarts each of pureed pumpkin and courge longue de nice in the freezer. I will bring another batch of pumpkin bars to a dinner next week, but beyond that I got nothin. Except a recipe for pumpkin apple muffins that looks delicious if I ever get around to making it. I fear that we’re a little muffined out on pumpkin, though, after last year’s seemingly endless stream of pumpkin bread. We’ll see.

food : butternut sage orzo

squash baked with apples and walnuts

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The whole kit and kaboodle, pre-baking.

I think I’ve mentioned that I’m dealing with a bit of a squash situation? Right. Last week’s efforts involved an upgrade of squash-baked-with-garlic that was inspired by a recipe at Simply Recipes (a site I use as a starting point for both new ingredients and classics that I just never tried to make before). I was planning to make the recipe as written, with adjustments to the butter and sugar, but because we live Down South, cranberries aren’t available in the grocery stores yet, even though it’s been autumn for three weeks. (Maybe this is unfair and you don’t have fresh or frozen cranberries available Up North yet, either?)

My version: toss together peeled and chunked squash (I used courge longue de Nice), peeled and chopped apples (I used Stayman, because I wanted them to keep their shape), minced garlic (I used about 4 or 5 or 6 cloves), whole walnuts, olive oil, and salt and pepper (I could have used more salt), and then bake at 375F for about an hour (until the squash gets soft). It was, I have to say, pretty good.

squash baked with apples and walnuts

gingery butternut squash soup

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Four kinds of apples, two for eating and two for cooking.

I am generally hard-pressed to choose a favorite aspect of autumn, but apples are very close to the top of the list. Each time I come home from the farmers’ market, I bring more apples with me. More types in greater volume on every trip. Today I went in search of apples for eating (my partner takes them in his lunch, and we have decided that local minimally-sprayed-and-delicious is better than shipped-from-another-continent-and-tasteless organic) and for cooking. The soup I was planning to make last week to use up some of the squash includes apples, and I’ve been waiting to get going on it since Thursday’s market was rained out. In addition to using one of the butternut squashes, it required the last of the fresh ginger from the container in the freezer and a container of broth, so I have been excited about it for many reasons. Yes, my college Tetris addiction is manifesting in an obsession with constantly rearranging the freezer to maximize space, I admit that.

Today I made it to the afternoon market and collected more apples than I currently know what to do with, including the two I need for the soup. I’ll worry about the rest of the apples later. The soup is easy (again from Simply In Season): sauté two chopped onions and two tablespoons of minced fresh ginger in oil until the onions are translucent; add 1 chopped (peeled, deseeded) butternut squash, two chopped (peeled, cored) apples, and 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock; bring to a boil and then simmer until the squash is tender.


Soup, in the beginning.

You are then directed to puree the soup, but I hate pureeing soups so I just usually mash everything in the pot with the potato masher instead. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever used the masher to actually mash potatoes, only for soup, although a friend once used it to get holiday cookie frosting to the right consistency before I bought the hand mixer two years ago. Back to the soup: mashing works pretty well if you are not French and don’t mind having slightly lumpy soup (the onions don’t mash). You’ll also probably want to add salt, unless you put a lot of salt in your stock. I don’t include any, and I’ve had to add salt for taste to every recipe in this book that calls for stock, which makes me suspect they’re assuming salty broth.


Soup, at the end.

And there you have it: soup. This recipe would probably adapt fine to the stronger, less sweetly flavored courge longue de Nice, which is good because figuring out what to do with all that squash is next week’s task.

gingery butternut squash soup

butternut squash galette

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Squash!

This summer we received a lot of squash from our farm share, and I do mean that nearly literally. Four butternut squashes and about that much again of an enormous squash called courge longue de Nice, which I had neither heard of nor seen before joining our CSA. In addition to this bounty, I picked up a couple of small pie pumpkins when they appeared at the market last week, as I’ll be bringing pies to our friends’ Thanksgiving dinner this year. When we received the first hunk of courge longue — a squash so big that only a piece of it nearly filled our weekly box — I cubed it, tossed the pieces with olive oil, minced garlic, salt, and pepper and then roasted it into submission until it was soft and sweet. I confess that I tried this approach last year and didn’t peel it or cook it long enough and it was bitter; as a result I let one of last year’s lovely huge specimens go to waste, a loss I am trying to avoid this year.

At any rate, we ate an entire dinner of squash (pretty much) and it didn’t seem to make any kind of dent in the stores. Which is good in the return on investment framework and not as good for the hope of ever eating anything other than squash again. With this in mind, I set out to discover what else I could make from our squash. For last night’s dinner (and today’s lunch) I chose the Winter Squash Galette recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I knew from my experience in the spring that I was capable of making a galette, and I happened to have everything in the recipe already in the house, which is less common than I would like when I’m trying to use Deborah Madison’s recipes. In only a few easy (but somewhat time-consuming) steps, we had dinner.

Step one: halve and deseed the squash, brush it in olive oil, stick a head’s worth of cloves of garlic (separated but not peeled) into one of the cavities, and bake facedown on a cookie sheet at 375F for about 40-50 minutes (my large squash took 50, the recipe says 40, the main thing is that the squash be tender when it comes out):

The squash cooling before being mashed up.

Step two: sauté one chopped onion in a skillet with 1 tbsp olive oil and 2 tsp dried sage (or 2 tbsp chopped fresh) for about 12 minutes until onions are soft and have changed color:

Delicious smelling onions.

Step three: mash up the squash, squeeze the soft garlic cloves out of their husks and mix it in, mix in the onions, and mix in 1/2 cup of grated parmesan or pecorino cheese (I used pecorino, because that’s what I happened to have bought on a whim on my most recent trip to the store):

Cheese! In a bowl from the White Dog Café!

Step four: let the filling cool, salt and pepper to taste, make one big galette or several personal galettes with the dough that you made already and rolled out and has been chillin in the fridge, and bake on a cookie sheet for 25 minutes at 375F (if you are making small ones, they can go on a sheet with an edge as they can be lifted out with a spatula; for a single large one I recommend no edge and sliding them off onto a wire rack pronto while they are still very hot and before the butter cools and makes the galette stick to the sheet). [Aside: I was unable to get a good photo of the finished product, so that will have to wait until the next time I make these.]

If you aren’t going to eat the whole recipe at once, Madison recommends that you store the extra dough and the filling separately and bake the galettes up fresh, and I concur. We made two more today for lunch, and I used the last piece of dough (somehow I was able to divide more evenly by five than six) to make a galette with some of last winter’s membrillo that we still have in the fridge. I haven’t had a jam tart in a very long time, and I have to say that this version was delicious. I highly recommend what I have been known to refer to as ‘sugar pie’ to everyone.

butternut squash galette

tomato season

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About half the tomatoes we received from the folks we know in Frederick.

This summer we expected to have three sources of tomatoes: our farm share; our own plants; and my partner’s boss, who brings surplus vegetables from his home garden into the office. As expected, we did receive quite a few from the farm share, which I ate sliced onto sandwiches if they were big and my partner took as part of his lunch if they were small. Sadly, our homemade boxes did not really work out. I suspect that we both overwatered and overfertilized them, as the plants turned pretty much completely brown. We ended up getting about a half dozen cherry tomatoes and four regular ones from the seven plants, with a very daring squirrel making off with most of the green tomatoes as they reached a goodly size. We may try again next year, but it’s more likely that we’ll dig a garden into the ground either next summer or in two years, whenever the major work on the foundation and in the yard is completed.

By far the most prolific source of tomatoes, though, was my partner’s boss. He and his spouse have an enormous home garden that includes 40 tomato plants of 25 varieties, and that’s simply more than they’re able to eat and process. We were invited up to the house to see the property and have dinner; they built a house on former farmland that is now wooded and zoned for conservation. After a very nice evening walking in the woods, harvesting in the garden, and sharing a meal, we were sent home with a trunk full of mason jars — this was part of the plan, as they had acquired many more than they now need over the years and were looking to donate them to someone just starting out with canning, which would be me — and a back seat full of beautifully hued heirloom tomatoes. When we got home, I sorted them into baskets by type and promptly gave away about a third of them to neighbors and friends, discovering in the process that heirloom tomatoes are a perfectly valid and welcome contribution to a summer potluck. Even with eating the cherry tomatoes like they were candy, we were still left with about a dozen quarts of tomatoes of varies shapes, sizes, and flavors, which required me to get creative.


Chopped up and headed into sauce.


Chopped up and headed into turkey lentil pilaf.

The first thing I did with the tomatoes was stew them up with onions and the spicy peppers we received from our farm share into a sauce that I served over cornbread. I use the cornbread recipe from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, substituting just about everything: I like the recipe because it remains delicious with rice milk, whole wheat flour and egg beaters. We had that meal for a couple of nights, I put three containers of sauce in the freezer, and we were still looking for something to do with the rest of the tomatoes. I turned at that point to my new favorite cookbook, Simply In Season and hit upon turkey lentil pilaf. This recipe not only used a bunch of fresh tomatoes, but had the added advantage of using the two packages of ground turkey that had been in the freezer for nearly a year. It also used up a of couple of containers of chicken broth that I made last winter from the farm share’s stewing chicken and some of the lentils and some of the stockpile of lentils and rice, so it was a good eating-from-the-stores recipe all around. Between making that twice, eating sliced or cherry tomatoes as snacks, and mixing up a couple of large batches of cucumber-tomato-mint salad, we managed to make our way through the tomatoes in about two weeks.

Of course, our farm share tomatoes kept coming: I have about a quart in the kitchen right now and will pick up more tomorrow. The ones in the yard, we decided to just leave for the squirrels.

tomato season