Revisiting squash, and stuffing

For a committed farmers market geek, like me, the appearance of a new vegetable is a cause for excitement (I SAID I was a geek). Yesterday, there were a couple of new varities: broccoli, and the first field zucchini. Broccoli is next on my list, but I went for the squash. Green and yellow.

There are a lot of people who just do not care for squash. They find it watery, bland, tasteless, with bad texture. And if it's cooked badly, it is all of these things. I'm going to be posting many recipes involving squash during this summer, and here's the first one, combining several ideas that have showed up on this blog: how to buy squash, and how to stuff vegetables. This is really a neat recipe to have in your back pocket. You can do it with just about any stuffing you like, but I'm going to give you my favorite one.

To make this for six people, I bought six squash. Three yellow ones, and three green ones. Now, something you have to keep in mind: squash are not all the same. The yellow squash varities, in my experience, tend to be bigger, with an almost "pear shaped" end, while the green ones are straighter and more even. The yellow ones seem to hold more water too, although any summer squash (with the possible exception of avocado squash), will be very full of water. I was making stuffed squash for six, and I thought half yellow half green would make a nice presentation. Had I more time, I would have made two stuffings. (DONT TELL MY GUESTS).

When I have had stuffed vegetables in many restaurants, I find that the "boat," i.e, the squash half, is either raw or overcooked. When it's raw, you can't really do much other than to eat the stuffing, and then treat the "boat" as a salad. When it's overcooked, you just have a mess, and all of those nasty qualities that I described above. Well, I like the way I do mine, so give it a try.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to clean out a raw squash so that it's a receptacle for stuffing. So what I do is slice them, lengthwise, as evenly as possible. I did this late last night, so it wasn't as pure as it could be. I didn't measure the squash, but I'd say that they were about 8-9 inches long (keep in mind that a man is writing this), and then I put them in a pot of boiling, salted water.

Here's an important tip: squash are very light. If you are trying to boil them, you'll need to weigh them down. I took the cover of a smaller pot, and used that. I let them cook for six minutes and then fished them out.

Hot squash burns. Badly. So I let it cool until it was at room temperature. Then, I took a SMALL spoon (VERY IMPORTANT: make sure the spoon is no wider than the center of your squash), and gently scooped out the centers. This is mostly soft flesh, and seeds. And with help, it's delicious. I chopped it coarsely. Then I added it to a frying pan, slicked with olive oil, a chopped head of new garlic, and two chopped, purple, spring onions. I added about a teaspoon and a half of chopped fresh time, and a good pinch of salt. The garlic and onions cooked slowly as the water from the squash came off and evaporated, and the water kept things from burning. You wind up with a thick mass of aromatics and squash. To that, I added about half a cup of dry bread crumbs, and stirred this up, just to toast the crumbs a bit.

This whole mix looked a little dry to me, so I added a dollop of olive oil.

This gave me enough filling to sparsely fill all of my twelve half squash. And here we come to another very important point. The cooking of the squash filling will reduce the volume of your materials drastically. If you want to really "Heap" the squash halves with filling, you should chop up a few more squash and add them to the filling. What I had was enough to make a "boat" that was not filled, but that was okay, because I have other things on the plate. If this were "DINNER" I would have needed more. Anyway, I scooped it into the shells, and then put them in a big (9x13) inch glass baking dish that I had coated with olive oil and baked them for twenty minutes.

The smell of the thyme and the toast was intoxicating. The whole apartment smelled gorgeous this morning from this.

If you want the crumbs toasty - REALLY toasty - run this under the broiler for a minute or two. And if you like, you can sprinkle this with grated cheese, either before or after broiling. Of course, you can leave it out, as I did.

Other fillings? Well, add some meat to what I just described. For example, if you have a few leftover meatballs, break them up and add a bit of tomato sauce. Rice and peas, if you have leftover risibisi (which we never do). Some sausage perhaps, or mushrooms. Cubed bread. Just about anything.

It's a good dish. And when the monster squash - the ones the Brits call "marrows" manifest themselves later in the summer, you can use this preparation to cook them as well, and serve slices of it to people, instead of the whole thing.

It didn't sound too hard to do, did it? Try it. Squash is available just about the whole summer and fall, so it's good to have something in your repertoire to use it.

I can't wait to try it tonight