Well sort of. Since November, I had the last two butternut squash sitting in the basement, waiting to be cooked. I was going to peel, cube, and roast them for pizza with caramelized onions and goat cheese for a cookie party appetizer, but it seemed just too hard to deal with cubing squash while I had the cast on. Finally, I cubed and roasted the smaller of the two for the enchiladas at the first one-dish dinner, and the bigger one I just plain baked. It came out kind of watery and stringy, but I thought I could still using it in something. It’s been sitting in the fridge in a tupperware, getting more and more forlorn. I tried to eat some for dinner one night, but that’s when I discovered that it needed help – lots of butter and brown sugar. I had sneaked some less than good baked squash into a vegetable soup, and it had a nice smoothing & sweetening effect, so I thought maybe that’s what I’d do with this batch. Later I was taken with this puree recipe, because it uses chicken fat, of which I also have a container in the fridge – but it uses sweet potato balance the squash.
I did use some of squash in the first thing I made from one of my Christmas books, a sweet potato pound cake from All Cakes Considered.
While walking home tonight I remembered a parsnip souffle recipe in Anne Bramley’s Eat Feed Autumn Winter – a book I did recipe testing for (it’s a nice gig, recipe testing – you do not need to make production quantities of anything, only a small batch, and it’s almost better to be less pro – more like a typical home cook; I’ve done it twice and would love to do more). Anne’s parsnip souffle recipe has a nice trick: you cook the parsnips and then puree them in the food processor with flour and butter while they’re warm, so it’s like making the roux that the souffle needs, without having to make a roux. Anyways, I figured it would work OK with the squash – but it must’ve been a lot wetter than parsnips – the top of the souffle was nicely brown and crusty but the interior was way too wet. It tasted good – We ate what we could and the rest went down the disposal (I don’t like composting prepared food). Despite concentrating on eating only the edible crusts, I now feel like I personally consumed at least 4 of the 6 eggs in the thing, and all of the cheese; I have that “boy was that rich feeling” just a bit too much.
Loose wet interior
Nice brown top
