On Thursday, I picked up my last basket of the season from the community supported agriculture (CSA) program at the local orchard. When I finally unpacked it on Saturday morning, I was dumbstruck by the amount of produce that I had accumulated because I hadn’t been cooking. Fortunately, most of it was less perishable, like sugar pumpkins, squash, and potatoes. However, some of it was highly perishable, like giant tomatoes, leeks, and frying peppers. Therefore, since I had another do nothing weekend, I resolved to get caught up on my produce consumption so that the farm fresh goodness wouldn’t go to waste.
I have never cooked acorn squash before, so I needed to do some research for ideas on what to do with them. Since I was securely snuggled on my couch, I turned to the Epicurious app on my phone for ideas. There seemed to be basically two different ways to prepare acorn squash: roasted with some type of glaze and roasted with some type of stuffing. Since I was intending to have the squash for dinner, I focused on the recipes where the squash was roasted, then stuffed, then roasted again. There seemed to be three options in that category: turkey sausage with kale, breakfast sausage with a molasses glaze, and wild mushroom with cranberry. After some consideration, I opted for the wild mushroom with cranberry because that sounded so cozy on a chilly fall day.
After I returned from the grocery store with shiitake mushrooms, dried cranberries, and plain bread crumbs, I realized that the recipe I was looking at called for cooking the squash in the microwave prior to stuffing. I don’t have a microwave. So I checked one of the other recipes, and learned that the squash could be roasted cut side down in a 375F oven for thirty minutes to achieve the same result. While the squash roasted, I made the stuffing. It started with melting way too much butter (three tablespoons!) and then sautéing chopped red onion, wild mushrooms, and dried sage until the mushrooms were soft. The stuffing was finished by adding the breadcrumbs, sautéing until they were lightly toasted, and then stirring in the dried cranberries and their soaking liquid. Unfortunately, when the timer rang for the squash, it didn’t look done to me. So I popped it back in for another fifteen minutes and amused myself with another project. When that timer rang, the squash looked much better, so I stuffed it, covered it in parmesan cheese, and put it back in the oven for another ten minutes to reheat the stuffing and melt the cheese.
Despite being so simple, the mushroom and cranberry stuffed acorn squash was so good! In fact, I was tempted to eat the second half while it was still hot; I thought better of it and wrapped the second half in aluminum foil for another day. Of course, if I were to do it again, I would probably use plain dry stuffing instead of plain breadcrumbs to give the filling some more substance.
Unlike the acorn squash, the giant tomatoes needed no research. They were destined to become gazpacho as soon as I picked up cucumber, red bell pepper, and some pitas at the grocery store. I had just made a basic gazpacho less than a month ago, so I didn’t even need to look up the recipe. The hardest part of making gazpacho is usually hauling out the blender from the Horde Cabinet, but this time I was challenged by trying to open the giant bottle of olive oil. I gave up on that and used the remainder of a small bottle of roasted garlic olive oil instead. Which turned out to be a good thing because I forgot to actually add garlic to the blender! Because the tomatoes were so big and juicy, I had to work the soup in three batches. In the first batch, I blended the tomatoes with some kosher salt until smooth and then added in the cucumber. Once the cucumber was fully incorporated, I poured out half the soup into my plastic pitcher. To the half in the blender, I dropped in pieces of two red bell peppers and a small red onion. Since that basically filled the blender, I dumped half of that out into the pitcher to make space in the blender to add the bread. I don’t like to have regular bread in the house, so I used small whole wheat pitas instead. Once the third pita was incorporated, that seemed to give the soup enough body. I dumped that blender into the plastic pitcher and stirred well to combine all the different iterations of the gazpacho into one consistent soup. Then I set the plastic pitcher of gazpacho in the refrigerator to chill. That also gave the bread a chance to absorb the water from the soup and give it a creamier texture.
Since I was still feeling a bit hungry after eating the acorn squash, I poured myself a bowl of the gazpacho. It was as good as ever! And that was fortunate, because there was enough of it to eat for lunch for the entire work week.
Butternut Squash
The weekend before my great push to use up my CSA produce, Little Z wanted to cook the butternut squash and some other produce for Sunday dinner. I went onto the Eat Your Books site and looked up the recipes in my library with butternut squash, apples, and leeks. Of the handful of recipes that popped up, Little Z most liked a curried butternut squash soup from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2002. I pulled the book from my collection before we went to the afternoon yoga class and left it in the car for us to consult before heading to the grocery store. We had intended to go to the grocery store right after yoga; instead, I set us on an interesting series of detours. By the time we parked in the grocery store lot, we were both still too full from the nachos we shared to even think about starting a soup on the stove. So we pulled back out of the lot to go back to my house without ever leaving the car.
Butternut squash seems to keep forever, so I was able to revisit the recipe the following weekend. Since I still had apples and leeks, the recipe was a go! Although the recipe called for a scant amount of cream to be added once the soup was pureed, I knew from my experience with the family recipe for carrot parsnip soup that the cream was likely to be unnecessary to thicken the soup. So I could easily do without it.
As I suspected, the most challenging part of making the butternut squash soup was actually preparing the butternut squash. I had to pull out one of my biggest sturdiest Henkel knives to chop the neck off the bulb, and then to chop the bulb in half so that I could scoop out the seeds. Both of my vegetable peelers bent by 45-degrees when I tried to use them to peel the squash. It was so frustrating that I took a break from the squash to weigh, cut, and peel the six apples that I also needed for the soup. The recipe only called for one pound of chopped Granny Smith apple; however, since I was using a milder Gala apple, I used closer to two pounds. After the apples were all prepared, I resumed my battle with the butternut squash. This time I puller a smaller, more flexible Henkel to try to cut the peel from the neck. Slowly but surely, it worked! After about an hour of effort, I finally had a bowl of peeled and cubed butternut squash, as well as a bowl of peeled and quartered apples.
Things went super quickly after the squash and apples were prepared. Since my leeks looked like they were on their last legs, I decided to use all three of them in the recipe. I heated up some grapeseed oil in my large soup pot and started the leeks sautéing while I gathered up the spices. Because I knew from experience that the Cooking Light recipes were mildly spiced, I decided to double the amount of spices in the recipe. I successfully put in twice the amount of brown sugar and twice the amount of curry powder; however, things then went awry. I had planned to add one and one-half teaspoons of ground cumin and one-half teaspoon of cayenne pepper (which was the closest that I could come to ground red pepper); unfortunately, I mistakenly had the cayenne pepper jar in my hand when I started to measure the ground cumin. So I had about four times the amount of cayenne pepper! But since these spices were being toasted with the leeks, there was no way for me to taste the mix to figure out how to correct for that. Therefore, I just added another tablespoon of brown sugar and figured that I could further correct the spices at the end, after I pureed the soup.
The recommended time was supposed to be enough for the squash and apples to completely soften. Sure enough, the squash cubes squished when I pressed them against the wall of the soup pot. However, I was still so frustrated with the butternut squash that I made other plans for dinner. Therefore, rather than risk splattering myself by putting an immersion blender into a pot of hot soup, I moved the pot to a cold burner, put the cover back on, and let it cool while I set about my alternate dinner plans.
When I finally got around to pulling out my immersion blender, the soup pureed quickly and beautifully. I thought the leeks might give me a problem, but they didn’t. The pureed soup was so thick and silky that I felt right about not adding cream to it at the end. I gave it a quick taste before calling it a night: the applesauce taste was right up front, then the butternut squash, and then it finished with a punch of heat. There definitely was no avoiding my mistake with the cayenne! Whether or not that made the soup inedible by the bowl was something to be determined another night.
Another Acorn Squash
Since I had only roasted one of my two acorn squash, I still had to decide what to do with the second one. I could either use up the remainder of the wild mushroom and cranberry stuffing or I could do one of the other recipes. Then again, this was savory cooking so it wasn’t as exacting as baking. With that in mind, I decided to make up my own recipe for the second acorn squash.
Since I had to go back to the grocery store to pick up some things for my alternate Sunday evening dinner plans, I also picked up two packages of sweet Italian sausage, four green bell peppers, two Vidalia onions, and two pints of cherry tomatoes. I was planning to make a sheet pan of sausage and peppers for dinner later in the week, but one of those sausages was destined to find its way into the stuffing for this last acorn squash. My thought was to remove the sausage from its casing, fry up the loose meat in a skillet, and then add in about half a cup of the wild mushroom and cranberry stuffing leftover from my first go around with the acorn squash. I figured the rest of the wild mushroom and cranberry stuffing could get tossed with the brussel sprouts that I roasted Sunday night. That should be pretty good - once it all got reheated.
I’m definitely convinced that 45 minutes at 375F is the right way to roast the squash before filling it. Just ten minutes with the warm filling is enough to finish it off. As good as the plain wild mushroom and cranberry stuffing was in the acorn squash, I think I liked it better with the addition of the sausage. The added fennel flavor from the sausage really perked up the flavor. However, I would still prefer to use plain dry stuffing cubes rather than plain breadcrumbs to give the stuffing even more body.
The Verdict
While I still have two bunches of beets, two sugar pumpkins, and a whole mess of apples left to use up, I feel like my weekend sprint to finish my CSA bounty was a success. I’m hopeful that the two sugar pumpkins can last until the week of Thanksgiving so that I can turn them into pumpkin curry soup for the big feast. The apples will most likely end up as homemade applesauce, especially if I can acquire a food mill so that I don’t have to first peel and core them all. The beets, however, are a mystery. They could end up mixed with some of the apples in a borscht, if I’m not already sick of eating soup for lunch and dinner, or I could do some research to find some other appealing possibilities. Then again, I’m not really fond of beets so I may just give them away to someone who is!
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