Tag Archives for squash

Roasted Squash & Farro Salad with Feta

When I was in high school, there was a class called “Home Ec.”  This might seem charming and antiquated, but wait til you hear the rest of it.  Home Ec was just for girls.  There was another class, a class that was boys only, and that class was called “Bachelor Living.”  I was always a little jealous about Bachelor Living–I suspected that while we were learning how to sew and cook and create tasty meals on a shoestring, the boys were throwing darts and drinking lager and grilling steaks. Maybe even playing the drums loud and throwing dirty clothes on the floor.  At best, they were probably learning how to hold their lives together just long enough to get married and have somebody else do all the hard stuff while they went out to have fulfilling careers.  This sort of thinking probably explains the collapse of the entire Home Ec curriculum in schools across the nation.  And, now that we have thrown the baby out with the bath water, can we look forward to generations of bachelors, hordes of helpless souls waiting around for someone to come sew on a button or put out a small kitchen fire (with baking soda!) or stretch a meatloaf with oatmeal to feed a family of six?

I say, bring back Home Ec!  For can there be more useful information than knowing how to care for ourselves, to learn to value food and spend sensibly in the domestic sphere, to have the resources to prioritize quality over convenience?  What a relief it was to enter into adulthood knowing how to cut up a chicken, to increase a recipe to feed twelve, to repair a torn seam, to plan ahead.  Teaching this knowledge in school says that as a nation we value this information, we think it’s important to be thrifty, to be self-sufficient, to abhor waste, and to spend time considering the choices we make.

Roasted Squash & Farro Salad with Feta 

1 med-large winter squash (butternut, pumpkin, acorn, red kuri, etc), peeled and cut into 1 1/2″ cubes

8 oz. farro, cooked according to package directions & cooled (found in the rice & grain section of the supermarket)

2 small sweet red peppers, diced

1 bunch green onion, sliced thin (white part and about 1/2″ of green)

1 small handful parsley leaves, chopped

4-6 oz. feta cheese, cut into 1/2″ cubes

juice of 1 lemon

1/2 tsp whole grain or dijon mustard

1/2 c. olive oil + extra olive oil for roasting squash

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 425.  Toss the squash cubes with olive oil, salt and pepper and spread out onto a baking sheet.  Roast, tossing once or twice, until tender and lightly browned.

When farro is cooked, spread out on baking sheet until cool.  When it’s cool, place in a large bowl, and add peppers, green onions, and parsley,  Set aside and make the dressing.  Place lemon juice and mustard together in a small bowl.  Whisk together until combined and continue whisking while drizzling in olive oil until dressing is emulsified.  Pour over farro mixture, stir to combine and correct seasoning with extra salt and pepper if necessary.  Add roasted squash pieces and feta cheese and lightly toss again.  Refrigerate or serve at room temperature.

Shaved Summer Squash Salad with Basil & Ricotta Salata

“I’d be way too intimidated to cook for you.”  More than the note I still pay every month, more than the scars on my forearms, more than years of eighty hour weeks, more than the lost hours of youth-preserving sleep, more than anything, it is hearing these words that make me feel that having a restaurant just cost too damn much.  For a world in which no one wants to cook for me is too bleak to contemplate.  Such a statement is nonsense, for nothing makes me happier than other people’s real cooking.  My life is filled with women who make amazing food.  A tangle of warm, oily noodles, fragrant with herbs, enjoyed on the back porch on a warm summer night.  Fried chicken, followed by ice cream with sticky butterscotch sauce and toasted pecans.  Danish hotdogs (who knew?) with remoulade sauce and crunchy fried onion straws.  Sweet and tart pickled beets and homemade bread and butter pickles.  Just-harvested arugula leaves in a giant wooden bowl, their peppery bite mellowed by balsamic vinegar, good olive oil and crunchy flakes of sea salt.  A plastic tub of mocha buttercream to just stick fingers in and lick.  Or perhaps best, a sliver of Iberico ham fed to me like a baby bird with eyes closed.  The deep joy of surrendering to another’s care and efforts to delight.

We’ve been “home” this week, visiting my godmother, my mother-in-law, and my mother and at each stop along the way, each of them has put delicious, soothing, interesting, nostalgic, innovative, and beautiful food in front of me.  Chocolate cake, fresh East Texas pinto beans, homemade macaroni salad, cornbread with cheddar and dill, chicken fried in my grandmother’s iron Dutch oven, berries and mango cut up and set in front of me in the morning.  This is the ultimate vacation–freedom from care, the giddy certainty that at least twice a day someone will feed me well.  Please, cook for me.

Shaved Squash Salad

1 pound mixed summer squash, sliced very thin

1/4 c. basil leaves, coarsely torn

1 small red onion, sliced thin

juice of 1/2 lemon

1/3 c. olive oil

salt & pepper

1 Tbs. creme fraiche or sour cream

salt & pepper

1/4 c. sliced almonds, toasted

1/4 c. ricotta salata, grated

Combine squash, onions, and basil in a bowl.  To make dressing, whisk lemon juice and creme fraiche in a small bowl.  Drizzle in olive oil while whisking constantly, until emulsified. Toss squash with dressing, almonds and ricotta salata.  Serve immediately.

Roasted Winter Squash with Porcini and Cream

The landscape of my childhood was not a green square.  “Out of the house!” my mother would insist on summer mornings.  We were not welcome back until lunchtime, when she would pass paper plates through the back door to us, cool, conditioned air creeping through the crack for a moment before it was slammed shut again.  No one asked us where we were going or what we were doing.  We dug holes in the sandy soil, built a fire inside, and boiled muscadines and flower petals to make potions, spread our shorts and t-shirts on the sandy bank of the slough so we could return home clean, waded through brackish water to conquer cities of abandoned concrete culverts, climbed trees, fought, spied through windows, frightened each other in the pet cemetery, slept outside, faced off mean dogs, caught tiny frogs and lightening bugs, and never got lost.  I imagined my children would do the same.  From the moment they were born, though, I was constantly bombarded with a single message: the world is dangerous, they must not go out in it, keep them close.  Maternal fear and protectiveness is a powerful instinct.  And so they have grown up safe, strapped in, fed well, protected.  I have searched my neighborhood online for sexual predators.  They have never, not once, ridden in a car without a seatbelt.  They do not eat high fructose corn syrup or trans fats.  Their water bottles are BP free.  We lock the doors at night.  They know what to do if someone tries to touch them inappropriately. They have our phone numbers memorized.  The batteries in our smoke detectors have been tested and are working.

Several weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, gripped by a new fear: what is happening to their childhood?  Tess is 11, almost a teenager, and she has never explored the world on her own, woven a reality for herself out of bits of string and crossed fingers, never navigated secret paths, or looked to the sky to judge how far away the rain is.  Liam, not quite two years younger, has never come home with his pockets full of dead crickets and sticks, has not put a penny on a railroad track, has not followed his sister up a tree away from my watchful eye, buried anything nor dug it up later, has not eaten anything from the woods on a dare, or skipped rocks.  What startled me awake was the tiny frogs from my own childhood.  I woke up remembering that after a rain, you could run out into the ozone-scented air, the sky still purple, and collect them by the hundreds in a jar.  I haven’t seen them in years.  Where have they gone?  Have they been decimated by pollution, contamination, disturbance to their habitat?  I don’t know, but I do know that if I had spent every summer afternoon carefully sequestered inside or safe in a green square yard, I would never know that they had ever been there in the first place, and not able to worry now about where they’ve gone.  Not only have I been coddling my children out of the uninhibited joys of childhood, but I have been robbing their adult selves out of a precious belief that the world is beautiful, magical, worth saving.  So, armed with the knowledge that the world is actually safer than it was when I was a child, I sent them out into it.  For the first few days, I fretted, and they skulked around the door, trying to come back inside.  Soon, though, I began to need to call them home for dinner, and they came tumbling back, muddy, pink-cheeked and laughing, hungry for a warm dinner, their eyes wide with secrets and the shared knowledge of what they’d been up to.  I didn’t ask.

Roasted Winter Squash with Porcini and Cream

adapted from Roast Figs Sugar Snow

This is more of a method than a recipe–the quantities are adaptable and will vary depending on what sort of squash you use.  You could even use a small pumpkin, or a red kuri squash.

acorn, butternut or confection squash, tops cut off and seeds scraped out–if using butternut, cut lengthwise

dried porcini mushrooms, covered in boiling water and soaked until tender

very thinly sliced garlic (about 1-2 cloves per squash)

fresh rosemary, minced

softened butter (about 1 T per squash)

salt and pepper

grated parmesan (about 1/4 c per squash)

Preheat oven to 350.  Rub the cut sides and cavities of squash with softened butter and season with salt and pepper.  Drain porcinis and chop coarsely.  Place sliced garlic, porcinis, and a good pinch of minced rosemary inside each cavity.  Fill cream about 2/3 way up cavity.  Place in oven and roast until squash is tender.  Top off with a little more cream if it looks as though they’re drying out.  Near the end of roasting, sprinkle each squash with parmesan and return to oven until cheese is golden and squash are completely tender.  To serve, top with sprigs of rosemary and let guests scoop out squash with cream and mushrooms.