Bone Appetite

Recipe: African Squash Soup

Mika and I included this recipe in our cookbook (now ten years old, and still in its first print run!), which was based in turn on the recipe in the Africa News Cookbook, sadly out of print but available (according to Amazon as of this writing) used pretty cheap. We love this as a "winter warmer" and I thought of it today since the temperature here was actually (gasp) below freezing. For years we made this as an appetizer for Thanksgiving, but the last few celebrations we trotted it out it was too spicy for the taste of any of the guests except for us. (And we thought we'd dialed it down.) No matter: this is a great soup and I heartily recommend it for potluck and various solstice-holiday-event parties, as it's quick, delicious, unusual, and warming.

Don't be fooled by the length of the ingredient list - this can be done in 25 minutes or so start to finish, with time off to attend to something else.

1 largish butternut squash, or 2 acorn squash, or equivalent amount of other winter squash
1 bay leaf
1 small onion, minced very finely
4-5 large cloves of garlic, pressed or minced finely
1 TBS cooking oil (we recommend peanut oil or canola if you don't want the peanuty accent)
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp black pepper (fresh ground is great, but not necessary - fine grind)
1 TBS fresh ginger, minced finely or grated (dried is a very poor substitute here)
1/4 tsp curry powder of your choice
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp dried rosemary; if you use fresh, try to mince as finely as possible
3 TBS fresh lemon juice, or more to taste (we always seem to put in more)

Peel, cube, and cover the squash in enough water to cover, then bring to a boil in a soup pot.

When the pieces are very soft, mash them. It's easier to do if you lift them out of the water with a slotted spoon and mash them in a bowl, and then return them to the water, but if you want to save washing an extra dish, you can mash them right in the pot.

Add the bay leaf and bring to a simmer.

In a small skillet, sauté the garlic and onions in the oil over medium-high heat. Combine the remaining spices and add to the garlic and onion. Turn the heat to low and sauté 5-10 minutes until the flavors have blended well.

Spoon a little of the squash liquid into the skillet with the spices, stir and simmer gently until well combined, and then pour the skillet mixture into the soup pot. Pour the lemon juice into the skillet to get all the remaining spices and such in the skillet, and then pour all this into the soup pot, too.

Add more water if the soup is too thick, and adjust to your texture preference. We like the soup a bit on the thick side. Adjust seasonings to taste (particularly the lemon juice at this point).

For kids and the spice-adverse: you can reserve a portion of the squash base before adding the spices, and simmer it separately, adding only salt and lemon juice to taste. It's bland, in my humble opinion, but if you have a sweet squash many kids can be persuaded to try it, particularly if you serve it with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream. It's not the same dish as the recipe above, of course, but it's a minimal effort to cook "two" dishes this way if you have some folks who you reckon will not like the complex and nuanced brew of spicing in this dish.

Recipe: Medley of Cold Squash Salad Recipes

No, the title is not a typo.

I had originally planned on doing a green salad tonight, but because I didn't use the summer squash last night, and I made focaccia for the main course tonight, my thoughts turned to cold squash salad. I was originally thinking a little EVO, lime juice, tarragon, maybe a little salt and pepper, over steamed and doused squash, chill in the fridge, pop it out when dinner's ready.

But, this thing called the Internet, it lets you check your thinking against the wisdom of the masses. When I had typed the appropriate search terms into the Google, this is the recipe that I found.

Now, as I'm sure we're all well aware by now, anything you find on the Intertubes must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Recipes would seem to be particularly risky with respect to attribution and provenance; there's hardly a real original recipe in the world, I would think, except insofar as we're all riffing on one another. (Maybe the Soylent Green Cookbook will be an original. GMOs, anyone? The GMO Cookbook! Now that's an idea waiting for an author!)

So, I looked at this particular recipe and I thought, why not? I've actually got an avocado unspoken for unhand and ripe, and yes, I have...cream cheese? Hmmm. What's up with that? And...green chiles? And olives are not listed in the ingredient list, but they are in the directions.

And that cream cheese -- a 3 ounce package? I've never seen cream cheese in 3-ounce packages. Cut into 3/4" cubes? 3 ounces of cream cheese would make, well, about four such cubes. And while I confess that I frequently pop cheese to be grated or cut into the freezer for ten minutes to harden it up and make the cutting process easier, trust me, this does not work with cream cheese. Who cuts cream cheese into cubes, and gets cubes when they're done? (Our cream cheese comes in a circular tub, making cutting it all the more problematic.) And...you figure out how much 3 ounces of cream cheese is. I guessed, using the pizza-cutting part of my brain.

All this makes me a little suspicious. That perhaps this recipe was modified, either by the website editor, the contributor, or wherever. Because, well, if olives were in the original recipe, but not the green chiles, and the cream cheese were feta, this would make a pretty decent Greek salad, particularly if part or all of the squash were cucumbers.

I cast no aspersions on Helen Rodriguez or InMamasKitchen.com here -- that's what we all do when we innovate or try to be creative with recipes. You take an existing idea, you monkey with it, it's either a success or it isn't and you can claim it as your own or orphan it. A little careful editing and kitchen-testing would help, though.

In my case, I couldn't make it quite as instructed. I substituted a shallot for the scallions, I skipped the green chiles and used olives (5, to be precise, because that seemed like the right number), I added a quarter of a roasted red pepper diced up, and I just tried not to smoosh the cream cheese entirely (I would've used feta had I any on hand).

This was not bad -- but I think it would've been better with the feta, and a bit more lemon juice. Mika says she likes it very much, complex flavors without anything really dominating and a nice mix of textures.

Now, would that be enough for an original recipe?

Veggie Box week of 10/22-10/28/09

This week:

Red beets - three, with greens. Will let Mika eat the beets and use the greens in a meal.
Yellow carrots -- four enormous ones.
Cameo apples (yum).
About two dozen small and very sweet San Marzano tomatoes
A gigantic Rugosa squash.
A somewhat sad red butter lettuce.
A happier large green lettuce.
Bonus summer squash - two zucchini and one green squash.

The Rugosa is a little funny because our farmer wrote in his newsletter about a month ago about how he'd planted the Rugosa this year as a bit of an experiment, and found they all grew so enormous and plentiful that he couldn't put them in the box because they were too heavy, and how he was going to end up letting them rot in the field since they weren't a very popular variety. When we went to the farms' harvest festival a few weeks ago, I was bemused to see they'd actually priced the rugosa competitively with other squash varieties, despite the surplus and lack of popularity of the variety. I suggested, in all seriousness, to the farmers at the event that they just give away a rugosa to each participant as a door prize. They thought I was joking! So I am very amused this gigantic rugosa is part of our box this week. I have it on the meal plan for Sunday dinner -- I'm tempted to reserve it for soup, except I really want to wait for the buttnernuts for our annual Thanksgiving African Squash soup.