Blue, Blue Hubbard Squash

One of the best, and simplest, things to cook during this time of year, this cold and blowy time of late Fall and Winter, is a winter squash. These are certainly some of the most enjoyable vegetables (fruits, technically) to shop for, as their eye-popping colors, shapes and textures never fail to entertain, from acorn to spaghetti (a prize to the reader who can come up with a winter squash further on in the alphabet). Orange, yellow, green, striped, warty, curved, the varieties seem endless, and the big bushels full of them are one of the signature sights of Fall.

I've recently discovered the amazing hubbard squash, sometimes called the blue hubbard squash after it's wonderful sky-blue color. This is the big bruiser of the squash family, other than the mutant show-pumpkins. I've been told that if you buy a whole one the best way to break it open is to throw it from your roof. Luckily, there's a local grocer who cuts them up into nice wedges for less adventurous consumption. The flesh inside is a nice light orange, and the seeds are large and plump. I've also found the hubbard to be one of the tastiest of the winter squash, far outstripping the acorn (which I find a little bland) and easily contending with the butternut and the baking pumpkins.

My favorite way to cook one is to carve out the orange flesh away from the seeds and the skin and chop it into medium-sized chunks, an inch or two all around. I toss these with olive oil, salt, pepper and chopped fresh sage and throw them into a cast-iron skillet. Put it into a 400 degree oven and oven-roast for a half-hour to forty-five minutes, turning with a spatula every fifteen minutes or so. They should get soft and nicely browned on a couple sides. That's it, you can now eat them.

Oh, and the wonderful side benefit, my favorite salty snack in the whole wide world, spicy squash seeds. Separate the seeds (unhulled of course -the fiber's good for you, and crunchy) from the flesh and inner glop - though I recommend NOT cleaning them completely - a little of that stringy orange squash innards toasts up very well with the seeds, adding a little sweetness. Toss the seeds with olive oil, salt, pepper, and ground dried cayenne, to taste (in my case lots) and spread out on a baking sheet. These can go right in the oven with the squash, and will come out sooner. Shake them around every few minutes until they are toasted brown on both sides and sizzling. I dearly love these. If I could find fresh, raw, untoasted, unhulled pumpkin seeds to buy by the pound I would do so. As much as I love winter squash, I just can't eat the enormous quanitites I would have to in order to fully satisfy my craving for the toasted seeds.

Leftover squash, by the way, is great in soups (and great just reheated) but my favorite use for it is in a risotto. The soft texture and caramelized flavor perfectly suits the creamy complexity of a good risotto.

A Domestic Sunday in November

Hi Everybody! (Hi, Dr. Nick!)

I am very pleased to report that this afternoon I have baked the best loaf of bread, by far, that I have ever made myself. This doesn’t mean much, as I have probably baked somewhere around 6 or 7 loaves of bread in my life (not counting around 9 or 10 sweet quickbreads like banana or walnut). However, this was really a great loaf of bread, as good or even better than most high-end bakery breads that I can get. I owe it all to an article in last Wednesday’s New York Times Food Section by Mark Bittman, and I urge any and all interested parties to read it. Mr. Bittman was invited to the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York where the head baker/owner, Mr. Lahey, showed him an unusual method for baking an old-world style rustic loaf with a rich, flavorful crumb riddled with holes and a fabulously crackling crust.
Two aspects of the method are particularly noteworthy: instead of kneading the bread to develop the gluten, it relies on a long (12-18 hour) rising with a very small amount of initial yeast. This apparently develops the gluten quite satisfactorily with the added benefit of imparting great flavor from the long fermentation. The second unusual aspect is in the baking: the dough, after a secondary two-hour rising, is dropped into a preheated pot (such as a dutch oven) and covered for the first half-hour of baking, where it develops the crackling crust by baking within it’s own steam, mimicking the process of those expensive professional steam-injected ovens.
This was one of those articles that really excited me, and I immediately decided I would try it soon, but of course there was a hefty amount of doubt I had in it really working out so well. I was wrong. This was a wonderful bread. My results differed a little, I think, due to some inexperience and one small mistake. The second rising happens on a well-floured cotton towel, and I lost a bit of the dough in transferring it to the pot. I think this caused my loaf to be a bit small and a bit flatter – more like a ciabatta instead of the boule pictured in the NYTimes article. But who cares? It was a delicious ciabatta, if that’s what it was. My other little mistake, and I urge you not to do this, is that I was impatient and cut into the bread when it was still too hot and still steaming – so the interior crumb was a bit moist and gummy. It was still delicious and the texture quickly improved, mostly, but you should wait for the bread to cool down before you cut it, or at least until it’s warm and not still hot. If you can see the steam coming off of it, wait. You can easily reheat it later.
This is ideal as a dinner bread, for dipping in olive oil or spreading with butter, for sopping up sauces and throwing into soups. The crumb is too well developed with holes of all sizes to be used easily as a sandwich bread. I do look forward, however, to experimenting with mixing in some whole wheat flour and maybe some other grains and flours – flax seed, wheat germ, wheat berries – see if I can get a slightly healthier bread that I would also consider appropriate for breakfast toasting.
The article is most interesting and the recipe is very clear and easy, but here is a brief paraphrasing:
3 cups flour
1 ½ tsp salt
¼ tsp active dry yeast
Mix these well dry, then add 1 5/8 cup water – mix together thoroughly.
Put in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, leave out in a warm dry place for 12-18 hours. (I went for 16). The dough should be bubbly and inflated. Turn out onto a floured board and fold over onto itself a couple of times (do not knead). Let rest, covered, for fifteen minutes. Flour a non-textured cotton towel and put the bread onto it, sprinkle with more flour on top and cover with another towel. Let rise for two hours. 30 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a 6 quart or so dutch oven inside it. When ready, pull out the oven and throw the dough into it. Cover and bake for thirty minutes, then uncover and bake for another 20-30 minutes, until well-browned on top (the browner the better, I say). Cool on a rack before cutting into it!

Enjoy! I wish I could share it with you right now.

Walden in fall!

Today is the last day of my ‘home’ vacation, and while I am not dreading work, I will definitely miss the time I have had this last week. Nobody who knows me should be all that surprised if I say that dividing my time between reading, writing, birding and cooking sounds just about perfect.

I made an effort to cook some interesting meals this week. I started last Sunday with a Potato Gratin from It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten. Very simple, and unusually he omits any cheese, insisting that if you do it properly, it will develop a cheesy flavor all on its own, just from the potatoes, cream and butter. He’s right, and it was delicious, though who’s to say it wouldn’t have been even cheesier with a handful of Gruyere browned at the top? On a slightly related note, I made myself polenta with butter and salt for breakfast yesterday, and it developed quite a cheesy flavor as well. Very tasty.

Monday afternoon I made Beef Bourguignon from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. Once again, this was a very stripped down recipe compared to several others I looked at, which is probably why I chose it. It was delicious, savory and silky, rich, the meat fork tender, the carrots soft and meaty. I think maybe I was expecting something a little more exotic, but after all, it is essentially just a beef stew with a slight French accent. I do wonder, however, if I had done the Gourmet Cookbook’s recipe, which called for brandy, dusting the meat in flour before browning and an entire bottle of wine (Les Halles used, adjusting total amount ratios, the equivalent of about a cup and a half), if it would have had a more refined and unusual flavor or texture. It also called for mushrooms.

Tuesday I followed the outline for Spaghetti with Clams from somewhere in Bill Buford’s Heat. Good, but not quite the glorious dish of pasta infused with the flavors of the sea I'd hoped for. The different liquids, the wine and butter and juice from the clams, just didn’t come together seamlessly, and I oversalted the dish just a touch. The clams themselves were perfect and still flavorful. Maybe I have to steam them more, extract more of their flavor into the pasta.

On Thursday I made a very simple Chicken Soup recipe from Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking. This was just a basic chicken broth (with the chicken), ginger, dried shiitake mushrooms, and my own addition of some baby bok choy, meant to be served with a dipping sauce of Soy, sesame oil and ground Sichuan peppercorns. Pull out chunks of food from the broth and dip, slurp soup – a very healthy, easy, delicious way to eat. I will fool around with this approach more during the winter months, I am sure.
Okay, that’s all I’m going to write now. If you’ve gotten this far, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
-Brian