fall break with friends


i love squash. especially in the fall/winter, the smell of baking squash or pumpkin makes the kitchen so cozy! this morning at the farmers market on pleasant hill road, i found a beautiful butternut squash and a perfect little acorn squash. recently i've been just baking acorn squash and eating it plain (or with cinnamon mmm) but i had the imagination this morning to make stuffing for these particular squash (i feel like the plural of squash should be squish. hmm...) biking home then from the market, i started brainstorming what to stuff them with. when i was younger, my mum would stuff delicata squash with various combinations of spiced rice, apples, raisins, etc. so that is immediately what came to mind. more recently, i read a really interesting recipe in robin robertson's vegan planet cookbook for jalapeno-rice and chili stuffing. both sounded tasty, but what i ended up doing was some combination of both. :-)

the happiest part about this dinner (other than having holly, ben, maya, and nugget together at once) was that all the vegetables except the garlic came from the market this morning. anyway, more on the rest of the vegetables later. to start the squish, i cut them in half, removed the seeds, and lay them face down on a cookie sheet & baked them for about 40 minutes. side note: one of my most favorite smells is that of freshly cut squash. it reminds me of watermelon! haha my friends made fun of me this summer because i also like the sound of ripping watermelon (like when you don't cut it all the way and then tear the rind the rest of the way) anywho, you can do the same thing with squash, only to a lesser extent. good reason to cook squash - it smells and SOUNDS good! while that was baking, i made the stuffing.

1/2 a red onion from my scruffy looking friend at crystal springs farm, a large-ish amount of fresh parsley (from the guys with the hand-dyed wool), several cloves of garlic, about 2cm of this amazingly hot fresh red pepper mama brought (eek!), and 1 small peeled/chopped green apple were all sauteed together in a wee bit of olive oil. the only other spice i added (other than s&p later) were caraway seeds. for some reason, i associate these little guys with holidays, and i used a ton of them in this dinner (between this and the boiled beets, haha.) in the meantime, i cooked 1 cup of white rice. haha i forget that this all goes in some order. to the onion-y mixture, i added a cup of cooked black beans, salt and pepper. when the rice was done, i mixed some of it in, though i found that 1 cup was a bit too much. i probably used 3/4 a cup. the final ingredient i added to the stuffing was a handful of organic raisins. it may sound odd to have black beans, apples, and raisins in one mixture, but it turned out quite nicely! once the squash was thoroughly baked, i flipped them over (so shell side down now) and filled the scooped out section with the rice/black bean mixture. i found that the cavities on the buttercup squash had to be expanded, but such is life. :-) i put the now stuffed squash back in the oven for another half an hour.

to go with the stuffed squash, i boiled the two beets i found at the market and topped them with... more caraway seeds! another childhood memory for me involves eating oodles of deep red beets. i have always loved them, and i'd never realized that people generally don't eat a lot of beets in america. (understatement?) anyway, i love them and i was glad to discover that so do my friends! i also boiled a bunch of chard and sauteed it with a bit of garlic, olive oil, and soy sauce. it was nice to have something a bit saltier, because the beets were decidedly sweet.

i was happy to hear from holly that she enjoyed the texture of the butternut squash (generally too mushy for her taste). continuing the beet thought, she hadn't ever had one before, but determined that they are quite tasty. YAY! hehe another beet fan. i liked the little bit of apple in the stuffing, and i thought that overall the flavors went well together. the most important ingredient seemed to be laughter, however. during dinner maya had a very difficult time telling any kind of coherent story, but even her random attempts provided the levity and humor so needed after a long day of library-ing (or coastal studies lab-ing, for ben).