How to roast kabocha squash (and its seeds!)

Our CSA is starting to wind down, but in the meantime, it's been showering us with winter squash. We have received no less than four kabocha and six delicata squashes over the past two months. That's...kind of a lot of squash for two people to eat, especially when you consider the rest of the CSA veg supply.

Clearly, the solution is storage.

In traditional winter squash storage, you put your squash in a place where the temperature hovers around 50-55F, such as a garage or basement. Your squash should be dry, free from any punctures, and have short stems still attached. Then all you need to do is leave them there until you want to use them. Squashes will generally stay good for at least two months when stored this way.

Of course, there are a couple problems with this system. First, it assumes that you have an appropriate 50F space in which to keep your squash. Here in California, that can get iffy, and if you happen to live in an apartment, it's going to be nearly impossible. Second, you still have to process an entire squash any time you want to eat one.

So I decided I was going to get ahead of the game by roasting a couple of my squash and freezing the cooked flesh. I picked out a green and an orange kabocha, and I got to work.

This method should work for most large thick-skinned winter squash.

Roasted kabocha squash

Begin by preheating your oven to 400F.

Halve your kabocha squash carefully with a sharp butcher knife or chef's knife, working your way around from one side to the other. Scoop out the seeds and fibrous bits and reserve them for roasting separately.

Rub the flesh of your squash pieces with a little grapeseed oil, plain vegetable oil, or butter. Season with a sprinkle of salt.

Put the squash halves, flesh side up, on a baking sheet lined with a silicone mat. Bake for approximately 40-50 minutes, or until the flesh is soft all the way through when tested with a knife. Rotate the pan halfway through cooking.

When your squash is done, remove it from the oven. If you like, you can eat it now, right out of the shell, with some more butter and a little sprinkle of pepper and salt. Otherwise, let your squash halves cool enough to handle, and scoop the flesh out of the skins. Scrape with a spoon to get as much as you can. The skin will be fairly delicate by this point, but it's edible, so you don't have to worry too much about the occasional shred of skin in your squash flesh.

Now you can use your squash however you please. Mash it well with plenty of traditional mashed potato fixings! Make it into a not-actually-pumpkin pie, and another, and another! Try out a lovely squash soup! If you're feeling especially adventurous, try out a squash cocktail! Or just cool it and pack it into containers to freeze for later squash purposes!

You know which option I chose: eight cups of kabocha squash, safely packed away for future squashy endeavours. It's so satisfying to have a bunch of these in the freezer, just waiting for me to pop them open and create something delicious.

While my squash was in the oven, I started on the seeds. Bonus: these can absolutely roast at the same time as the flesh.

Roasted kabocha squash seeds

Wash your seeds well in a few changes of water, swishing to remove as much fibrous matter as possible. A little clinging shred here and there should be fine. Press your seeds in a clean tea towel to remove most of the moisture. You should have approximately 1 cup of seeds per squash; I had two squashes, so I was working with two cups of seeds (and two colors besides!).

Put your seeds in a large bowl. Toss with 1 1/2 teaspoons of grapeseed oil (or the oil of your choice) and approximately 3/4 to 1 teaspoon of salt per cup of seeds. Since I was working with 2 cups of seeds, I used 1 tbsp of oil and 2 tsp salt.

If you want to season your kabocha seeds more, now is the time to do it. I just went for the basic salt, so my finished seeds would be more versatile.

Spread your seeds in one layer on a baking sheet lined with a silicone mat. Bake at 400F, stirring every 5 minutes, until all your seeds have turned a pale golden brown and begun to snap and crack in the heat. My seeds took approximately 20 minutes to roast.

The finished seeds will be nutty, salty, and crunchy. Since they aren't husked, they will require a bit of chewing, but the effort is worth it in the end. Eat with a tall glass of frosty apple cider or beer, toss a handful into a batch of caramel corn, use a few to garnish soup, or serve a little bowl alongside a platter of cheese and olives.

Store the leftovers, cooled completely, in a sealed container in the kitchen cupboard.

Do you have a glut of CSA vegetables (or garden vegetables, or really any vegetables) to use up? What are you planning to do with them?

I love you, freezer.

It has not been the easiest few days. Good thing I have a bunch of soup in the freezer.

This one was a basic lentil soup with potato, carrot, and onion. I defrosted it on the stovetop with a little water. In the meantime, I loaded the rice cooker with quinoa, pulled some sungold tomatoes and scallion greens out of the garden, and excavated the fridge in search of plain yogurt and sambal oelek.

Voila: lentil soup with hot quinoa, tangy yogurt, spicy sambal, and delicious fresh vegetables.

Everything seems much more doable after a lunch like this.

Garlic dill pickles!

There was an entire box of cucumbers in the sort-out bins at the farmer's market this weekend. What better opportunity for pickle-making?

Ok, if I grew my own cucumbers and was suddenly drowning in all the harvest, that would be a better opportunity, yes, but I didn't do that this year. Although I suppose I could start some vines and go ahead--we still have a good two months of serious heat to go. Hey, why not? I did it last year at about this time.

Anyway. Pickles!

Obviously these are not pickling cucumbers. Oh well; let's see what kind of results I get.

I used the garlic dill pickle recipe from Food in Jars.

These were very easy. I soaked my cucumbers in water for several hours, dried them, and cut them into fat chunks. I stuffed the pieces into four sterilized regular-mouth pint jars with dill seed, red pepper flakes, peppercorns, and a couple cloves of garlic each. I made a half recipe of brine by boiling vinegar, water, and pickling salt, and poured it over the cucumbers, filling to 1/2 inch headspace. I wiped the rims, lidded and ringed the jars with sterilized equipage, stuck them in a rack, and processed them in the boiling water canner for 10 minutes. Then I let them cool overnight on a cooling rack on the kitchen counter.

I'm having kind of a hard time not just popping open a jar and eating a few of these, but you're supposed to let canned pickles age for at least a couple weeks, so. I will be good!

It became obvious a few days later, when I was sitting around thinking about how I should make a batch of dilly beans, that I should have made both recipes at once and concentrated the canning heat and vinegar brine into one two-hour session. Oh well--now I have a better plan for next time.

Hooray! Pickles!

Macaroni and lamb casserole with red wine tomato sauce

It's summer! It's hot! Let's talk about making hearty, rib-sticking casseroles, ok?

HA HA HA oh I'm actually serious. You can take the girl out of the midwest, I guess.

I work at home, so I frequently end up actually stopping work and cooking lunch in the middle of the day. While this is ok--breaks generally help with work--it can definitely become a major intrusion if I'm in the middle of something but realize I need to eat ASAP. So I decided it would be a good plan to freeze a batch of casseroles that I can just stick in the oven (or, better yet, the toaster oven) to cook while I work.

I decided on the ultimate heritagenous comfort food: macaroni casserole. When I was growing up, this consisted of browned ground beef and tomato sauce mixed with macaroni and mozzarella cheese and baked. This time, for a little more interest and a little less ground beef, I decided to go for ground lamb in a red wine sauce with fennel seed and oregano. A good deal all around.

I made about enough pasta to fill an ordinary 9x13 casserole dish, but split everything into three smaller dishes. If you want to have a larger freezer stash, or bake half and eat it now, feel free to make as much as you please.

Macaroni and lamb casserole with red wine tomato sauce

ground lamb
olive oil
onion & garlic
mushrooms, red pepper, whatever other veg you want
tomato puree/sauce/whatev
dry red wine of your choice
fennel seeds, oregano, basil, red pepper flake, salt, pepper
macaroni/chunky pasta of choice
mozzarella/other cheeses of choice

Game plan: Brown lamb. Make sauce. Cook pasta. Combine everything into a selection of casserole dishes. Bake or freeze according to your current priorities.

Ok! Start by heating up a wide & deep saute pan, adding a small slug of olive oil, and crumbling in half a pound (or more) of lamb. You could also use a deeper sauce pot, since you'll be cooking the sauce in this pan, but I like the wide pan for faster liquid evaporation. Season with some salt, pepper, and fennel seed, and stir to mix, breaking up any larger chunks of lamb as you go. Cook until browned, stirring frequently. Then drain off and discard most of the fat, leaving just enough to saute your vegetables, and remove the lamb to a plate.

Chop up an onion and a handful of garlic cloves and add them to your saute pan. Cook to soften while you chop up whatever other vegetables you want. I used mushrooms and red pepper, but hearty greens, summer squash, or eggplant would all work too. Add your veg to the pan in order of necessary cooking time, starting with those that take longer. Season with salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and some red pepper flake to taste; cook to soften. This is also a good time to put on the water for your pasta.

Next, add your tomato puree, stirring to mix & deglaze. Bring to a simmer before adding the cooked lamb and a glassful of red wine of your choice. You could also use dry vermouth (or no alcohol at all) if you don't want to deal with an open bottle of red wine. Stir well and bring back to a simmer. Reduce the heat and cook slowly for about ten minutes, or until the sauce reaches your preferred consistency.

Don't you just want to get in there and swim around? No? It's just me?

Ok. While your sauce is simmering, cook your pasta. Any chunky pasta should work here; I used a ridged macaroni. You can also shred or chop the cheese of your choice while you're waiting. I used mozzarella for ultimate heritagenousness, but various grating cheeses, provolone, or more highly flavored oozy-melting cheeses like fontina should all work. It just depends on your tastes.

When your pasta is done, drain it. Taste your sauce and correct any seasonings. Add your drained pasta to the sauce, stirring well.

Your pan should look like this, complete with unruly steam curling up into every picture.

Everything is cooked; now it's time to assemble. Add an even layer of the pasta and sauce to your casserole dish(es), filling it a bit less than halfway. Add a layer of the cheese of your choice. Cover with another layer of pasta and sauce. Finish with a second layer of cheese.

Now you can either bake your casserole or cover it and put it in the freezer for future application. I froze all of mine, personally.

When you want to bake, take your casserole out of the freezer and let defrost a bit while you preheat the oven to 350F/175C. If you're using Pyrex or other ovenproof glass, it's important to bring the glass up to room temperature before you put it in the oven. I usually run them under warm tap water if I don't have enough time to defrost them for real. This is not a big deal as long as your casserole dishes have lids. If you're using ordinary tins, it's fine to just put them straight into the oven.

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, or until hot through and bubbling.

Hooray! Low-effort, hearty, & serious food!

Massive freezer burrito stash!

Ideally, we'd make and eat a delicious, healthy, quick, easy, and mood-targeted dinner every single night. However, sometimes you just need to eat but don't have the time/energy/desire to make the effort to cook. Why else does the frozen entree industry exist?

So. To circumvent the impulse to buy packages of frozen burritos--one of our favorite ridiculous convenience foods--I decided to make my own.

The first step was making a gigantic batch of refried beans. I soaked a whole bunch of pinto beans overnight, drained and rinsed them, and boiled them until tender with a couple of bay leaves and twice their depth of water in my biggest pot. This gave me not just a whole lot of perfectly soft and tender pinto beans, but also five--count them, five--containers of pinto bean broth to pop in the freezer for future soup enrichment. That's ten cups of broth! Hooray!

To make the refried beans, I warmed some olive oil in a big pot and added an onion, a handful of garlic cloves, half a serrano, a whole jalapeño, and a couple of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, all of which were chopped. I seasoned everything with cumin, oregano, salt, and more chipotle in the form of powder. When all the vegetables were softened and super-fragrant, I added ALL THE BEANS IN THE WORLD and their remaining broth. I mixed it all together and let it cook for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, to give the beans a chance to absorb some more flavor. To get the beans to ultimate smoothness, I took the pot off the heat, let it cool slightly, and pureed with an immersion blender.

Voila! A massive pan of refried beans!

To set up my burrito-making station, I cooked some brown rice in the rice cooker. I cut up some green onions. I sliced up some cheese. I found a bottle of hot sauce. I took the beans and tortillas out of the fridge to warm up enough to use. Then it was just a matter of starting the assembly line.

Lay out tortillas. Add beans, rice, onions, cheese, and a little dribble of hot sauce. Fold. Repeat.

I ended up with a massive batch of eighteen bean, cheese, and rice burritos. Hooray!

To freeze, lay your finished burritos on a cookie sheet, seam side down (so they won't unroll). Stick the entire sheet in the freezer for maybe half a day, or until everything is frozen. Then remove the pan, stick your brozen burritos in a resealable bag or other container, and stick them back in the freezer. You could also wrap them each in foil if you're planning to take them to work for lunch. This process ensures that your burritos won't freeze together, so you can actually get out one at a time without having to defrost the entire bag.

To heat frozen burritos, we bake them in the oven or toaster oven at 350F/175C for twenty minutes, or until hot through and beginning to brown. You can use the microwave if you have one. Since microwave power can vary, I'd start with one minute and heat for longer as needed.

These are obviously pretty standard burritos, but the method would work for practically any filling you want to try. I'd shy away from more liquid ingredients--raw chopped tomatoes come to mind--but otherwise, the sky's the limit. I think a black bean, sweet potato, corn, and kale burrito may be next on the list, or maybe a black bean, rice, garlic-seared summer squash, cotija, and cilantro burrito. I may even test out freezing a refried bean and sour cream burrito, for an ultimate sleepytime feast on nights when I want to do nothing whatsoever.

Success!

Food storage: welcome to my freezer

I thought this glorious US holiday weekend called for one thing and one thing only. That's right: pictures of my freezer!

Oh, okay, you can have a beer too. There's beer in the fridge part. Also wine up top. Choices, choices.

So you guys want to see my freezer? BEHOLD.

No, we really, really can't get the ice cream maker in there.

Note that this is only the first layer of stuff. Everything is approximately three deep, and mostly stored in pint containers.

The container idea came from living in Brooklyn and ordering Indian delivery every once in a while. The food came in these exciting little pint containers that perfectly held 2 cups of whatever you might want to put in them. They also were free, and stacked perfectly. So I started washing them out and reusing them. Eventually we went ahead and ordered 100 new, for ultimate freezer organization power. This also means we now have many fewer incidents in which, say, a bag of dried chickpeas suddenly splits in your hand and showers its contents all over the freezer. Good times.

Yes, they're plastic, and that's certainly not optimal, but it works for us at this point in time. The black containers are also reused takeout boxes, but they're made from corn. We feel a little better about using them, but we don't know where to find more!

We stuff all kinds of things into the freezer. Flours, grains, beans, pulses, and some baking supplies go in the freezer because after you've experienced one infestation, you don't want any more, ever. We could probably take these out and store them in the cabinet after a week or so in the freezer--there are a few containers of dried pintos and chickpeas in the pantry--but, well, why bother? This works out fine for now.

You can see my impulse for making ice cream is pretty well under control if that's my attitude.

So. Freezer contents.

I started labeling but had to stop because there is just too much stuff to list in one picture.

Grains, flours, & baking:
short-grain brown rice
long-grain white rice
arborio rice
barley
quinoa
oatmeal
couscous
polenta/coarse cornmeal
wheat flour
white wheat flour
gluten flour
chickpea/gram flour
rice flour
buckwheat flour
bulk yeast
turbinado sugar

Dried beans & pulses:
white beans
black beans
red kidney beans
pinto beans
adzuki beans
mung beans
chickpeas/garbanzo beans
yellow split peas/urad dal
green split peas
puy lentils
red lentils
green lentils

Broths:
chicken
fish
veg
bean (right now it's chickpea broth)

Vegetables:
stockpile
corn
peas

Meat & fish:
bacon
pork loin steaks
roasted chicken
precooked chicken sausage
(shrimp & whitefish filets pop in & out frequently)

Fruit:
dried sour cherries
dried sweet cherries
dried cranberries
dried apricots
backyard plums
strawberry & banana chunks
whole black bananas

Nuts & seeds:
cashews
almonds, slivered & whole
pecans
sesame seeds
(walnuts should be there but aren't)

Prepared food, which is to say, food I made:
chili
lentil soup
carrot soup
mini quiches
several black bean & rice-stuffed peppers
cooked beans in their broth (various)

Store-bought prepared food:
ice cream
a pound cake
half a box of disgusting fish sticks I really need to throw out
(sometimes we have frozen burritos or pizza)

Miscellaneous:
tempeh
ice
coffee

And that's just what's in there right now, for a household of two, one of whom is vegetarian! Imagine if we were serious coupon people, or fishers coming home with six gigantic salmon at a time, or hunters bringing home a deer!

This is why I now own a canner, incidentally. I want the summer tomatoes all year, but can they fit in there? No, they cannot. I want a lot more vegetables in the freezer as well as out, actually. We'll have to see what we can do about that. I mean, the freezer isn't organized, though it may seem so to the naked eye. It's just full of easily stackable containers. If I really got in there and went at it, I could almost certainly preserve a lot more food in the freezer. Hmm. I'm going to have to think about that one.

In the meantime I'm going to have a beer, though. Holiday weekend! Hooray!