Butternut Squash

-


My earliest memory of butternut squash was when I was in grade school. My family comes from a small town in the southwest corner of Oklahoma called Hollis. I spent time there with my grandmother in the summers. 

Back then, no one had ever heard of an HOA, so it was no surprise that her next door neighbor had turned his backyard into a garden and chicken coop. In my big city eyes it was like a tiny farm with huge plants and noisy chickens. I remember watching the chickens and their antics. He would give us corn from his garden in the summers. It was the best. 

One summer, Mr. Briscoe grew a new variety of squash, the Butternut squash. He gave grandmother one and told her to cut it in half, remove the seeds and fill the cavity with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. Then bake the halves, cut side up,  until it was tender.  I remember it as being wonderful. 

Memory is a funny thing and I wondered how realistic it was that my grandmother a good farm wife who was familiar with cooking anything that grew from the ground, had really never cooked a butternut squash. I did a little reading and sure enough the Butternut squash was developed as a cultivar in 1948. Since those were the days before TV cooking shows and internet searches, it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that it was still a new thing in small town Oklahoma in the mid 60’s. 

Today the Butternut is available year-round and is used in everything you can think of. Since winter squash is also called pumpkin in many places, it frequently substitutes as pumpkin in savory and sweet dishes. Someone once told me that most canned pumpkin was in fact butternut squash. On the Libby website, they admit that the pumpkin in their cans include the Dickinson squash which is a close cousin to the butternut. 


Here is a picture of one of our favorite pumpkins in North Carolina. It looks very much like a squash, but tastes just like pumpkin. In fact it is called squash in many places. So maybe it’s true that canned pumpkin includes butternut squash.

I have grown to love the versatility of butternut squash. It adapts to sweet and savory applications. Last night I used it in a spicy dish from the Caribbean called Callaloo which used ginger, thyme and allspice. But it also works well with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves or even spicy curry.

I went to the farmer’s market today and bought a Butternut squash. My first plan for it is to cook half of it just the way my grandmother cooked hers. I will bake it with cinnamon, butter and brown sugar. Then I will scrape all the tender flesh out, mix it up and serve it as the (somewhat) starchy side dish for tonight’s supper. 


That leaves me with a second half of that squash and the half leftover from making the Callaloo. I think I will try Butternut Curry from one half and Gnocchi with Butternut Cream Sauce from the other. 

Check back for recipes‼


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One Pot Meals – Pasta

-
Image
The thing about One Pot Meals is that frequently they aren’t. They have you cook the sauce in a pot then boil the pasta in a pot. Or they cook the meat in a skillet then add it to the sauce in a pan.  My goal was to make truly one pot meals. There will always be a few other tools like a knife and cutting board, bowl for marinade or cut up veggies, a measuring cup if one is needed, etc.  I also want to be able to walk into the kitchen and put a meal together in about 30 minutes. So here is how it starts. I looked into my veggie drawer and found zucchini, half an onion, some chopped garlic and a package of mushrooms. I also had some frozen pesto from last fall and a jar of capers. All those things pretty much defined the sauce.  But say my veggie drawer didn’t have zucchini and mushrooms. I could do pretty much the same things with a bag of frozen peas and carrots. (If your kitchen doesn’t have onions and garlic – it’s past time you made a grocery store run!!) For the prote...
Read more

The Sheet-pan Trend

-
Image
I didn’t intend to be trendy. I really just wanted to do fewer dishes. It seemed reasonable to cook an entire meal on one sheet pan. Who knew that sheet pan meals were going to become the new trend? If you look around on the Internet, you’ll see all kinds of sheet pan meal recipes. People are putting all their vegetables and potatoes and meats on one pan and cooking them together. Then, one pan to wash!! In fact, if you walk down the freezer aisle at the grocery store you can find a line from Birds Eye. They come in a bag and are called Sheet Pan or Oven Bake meals.  But the concept is pretty simple, and is easily tailored to what’s in your fridge for supper. I have done this with many kinds of meats and veggies. The trick is to think about how long you would usually roast each component then do a little math. The longest cooked item goes in first. When the remaining time is how long you want to cook the next thing, add that. Continue in this way until everything is in. I season ea...
Read more

Pumpkin Brownies

-
Image
Some of you may remember the pumpkin project last fall. I ended up with a freezer full of pumpkin purée. Recently I finally got to use most of what I had left by making pumpkin brownies for a bake sale. They were really good and very easy to do. I have written about my opinion regarding box cake mixes . I really think they are one of the great Food Science masterpieces of our times. So in this case I started with a simple box brownie mix. The one I used was the plain one from ALDIs. It called for water, oil and eggs to be added.  Home puréed pumpkin is wetter than canned pumpkin, so I substituted one cup of my frozen pumpkin for both the oil and water. It was brownie mix, 1 cup frozen pumpkin puree, and two eggs.  I did a trial recipe to see if it was going to work using a 9x13 pan. They were too thin and the texture was a little stoggy. So I used a 9x9 pan and added a tsp of baking powder to the powdered mix.  I baked them according to the package times and to an intern...
Read more