From the archives: Great Big Squash (and a pumpkin-butter recipe)

First posted September 2005. Since we have a butternut squash in the fridge, I might cook it tonight with some barley, for old time's sake.

Last weekend we went out to one of our favourite places that sells local produce (mostly grown right there). They still had great corn (we pressure-cooked it) and the most amazing butternut squash, some about as big as baseball bats, for $2 each. We bought one of the smaller "bats" and Mama Squirrel cooked up about half of it yesterday. Some of it got chopped into our dinner (a big casserole dish combining 1/2 cup pearl barley, 1 cup water, some chopped (raw) squash, four farmers' sausages, a sprinkle of salt and sage--baked until everything was done). Some of it got cut into chunks and cooked in another big casserole dish at the same time, then mashed. The mashed stuff then got made into a batch of pumpkin butter (which does work just about as well with butternut squash). 

Here's the recipe (it's originally from the Vegetarian Times Cookbook). You can halve it if you want just a small batch.

Pumpkin Butter

4 cups pureed pumpkin (or squash)
1/2 to 1 cup honey (or we have also used part brown sugar--it's to your own taste)
1 tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 to 3 tbsp. lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan and cook over low heat for 45-60 minutes, stirring often (and I find it takes longer than that, depending on how much you have and how hot you're cooking it). You'll know it's done when it's very thick, smooth, probably darker than you started with (pumpkin goes darker than squash), and it seems to pull away from the sides of the pot when you stir it. You can seal it in hot, sterilized canning jars, but we don't bother--we just keep it in the fridge. It's good on toast or muffins.

What's for supper? We eat our veggies

Tonight's dinner menu:

Chicken and rice from last night
Pan-cooked carrots
Spinach steamed with mushrooms

Pumpkin cookies, made with the last frozen cupful from a Hallowe'en pumpkin

What we had for supper: finish off those packages

Last night's dinner menu:

Ukrainian-style pork dumplings, which look like big tortellini. We got them frozen from the Eurofoods store.

Macaroni and cheese, made with very small farfalle (bowties) that we needed to use up.  I used The Boy's Smack 'n' Cheese recipe that I learned years ago from Coffeemamma, and let it sit to thicken towards the end rather than overcooking the small pasta.

A skillet vegetable mixture of (reheated) butternut squash, red pepper, and corn, heated with honey and water (that is, the end of a honey bottle swished out with water), salt, pepper, margarine, and nutmeg. I thought it would go well with the pork dumplings.

What's for supper? And a lovely pumpkin head

Tonight's menu:

Garlic Lime Chicken, from Saving Dinner (see video below)
Brown rice
Acorn squash
Tortilla chips, sour cream

The pumpkin was in the oven with the squash and the rice, to save energy.  I cut the face in it afterwards! (The top picture is just fooling around with the photo editor.)

Sometimes I bake things: Pumpkin butter pie

I've posted a recipe before for apple butter or pumpkin butter pie, but this is a different one.  I had some homemade pumpkin butter, and I thought it would be good in a pie, but I didn't have any cream of tartar. I also didn't feel like whipping egg whites for our special Thanksgiving-style pumpkin pie..

So I decided to use the recipe for Squash Pie, or Sweet Potato Pie.. I adapted it a bit to the amount of pumpkin butter I had--used a bit less milk and sugar, didn't add any extra spices.  The edges got a bit dark, but that often happens. And as you can see, it's already half gone.

What's for supper? S, S, S, S

Tonight's menu:

Sausage and sauerkraut and potatoes in the slow cooker
Salad

Squash cake, which is pumpkin loaf made with butternut squash.  (We cut the sugar to one cup in that recipe, and I added some wheat germ this time.) One to eat, one for the freezer.  (I'm stocking up.)

What's for supper?

Tonight's dinner menu:

The rest of the frozen mini quiches from last week, because they're getting frost on them
Mini sausages
Sweet potato squash
Brown rice-tomato sauce-celery casserole with chopped peppers and cheese on top (call it tomato pilaf or pizza casserole)

Blueberry dessert: frozen blueberries layered with leftover baked oatmeal, "baked" on the stovetop.

Harvest Spice Bars

These are bars made from the recipe for Raisin or Date Squares, from The More With Less Cookbook. Except that this time I made them with homemade butternut squash butter as the filling. Since "Squash Squares" doesn't sound that appetizing, Ponytails suggested "Harvest Spice Bars" instead. So be it.

What's for supper? And how to make a spaghetti squash cake

Yesterday's ranch-spiced chicken, chopped smaller, wrapped in tortillas and heated in chicken broth mixed with a bit of tomato paste
Choice of frozen spinach or frozen beans and carrots
Short-grain brown rice

Spaghetti squash cake!

(How do you make spaghetti squash cake?  Basic sour-milk muffin batter; run some cooked spaghetti squash through the blender along with all the rest of the wet ingredients; blend in a bowl with dry ingredients, including half a cup of rolled oats; sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar before baking.  Spaghetti squash is so mild and almost flavourless that you do need to add a bit of cinnamon or other spice; the cake won't be the colour of pumpkin or butternut squash, but more like an applesauce cake.)

What's for supper?

Tonight's menu:

Turkey-pasta casserole from the freezer
Leftover crockpotted chicken from last night (partly bones, but it is easier to just heat and eat it than to pick it apart)
A pan of little potatoes, cut in half and sprayed with olive oil before baking
Lettuce and celery salad

"Pumpkin" bars made with butternut squash

Thanksgiving cookie plate

Our contribution to a family dinner (along with bean salad and turkey).

The round cookies with blobs of white chocolate in the middle are Cappuccino Thumbprints.

The cake-type bars (iced ones near the middle, plain ones around the edge) are Peter's Pumpkin Bars.

The maple leaf cookies are Dare Ultimate Maple Leaf.

Photos (except for Dare cookie package) by Mr. Fixit.

What's for supper? Fall-type Food

Tonight's dinner menu:

Slow cooker filled in layers: sauerkraut, frozen barley cubes, kielbasa-type sausage, whole mushrooms, and sliced celery added later on.  I unloaded the sausage, mushrooms and celery into a serving bowl, and served the sauerkraut-barley layer separately.

Cheese perogies

Pumpkin-spice yeast bread, from a recipe in the bread-machine owner's manual.  I hadn't tried this one before, but it's a keeper. Ponytails says it would be good with apple butter.

Almonds and mini rice cakes

Vanilla pudding, thawed blueberries

What's for breakfast?

Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts.

What's for supper? From the freezer

Tonight's dinner menu:

The last of the enchilada pies, with sour cream, chopped green pepper, etc.  (I need my big pie plate back....)
Butternut squash  (because I want to make squash pie with the leftovers.)

Sliced pears, oranges, and banana chips

What's for supper? Using up leftovers

Want to play "The Supper Game?"

Tonight's dinner ingredients:

Two slices of Upside-Down Meatloaf
A bit of cooked rice
Leftover Reuben Chicken from last night (chicken cooked with sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing)
Red peppers (they were on sale last week)
Mushrooms
Half a cucumber, some lettuce
A bit of this and that

Tonight's dinner decision:

Chicken-and-rice-stuffed peppers. I didn't incorporate the meatloaf; we can eat that tomorrow. But I did add some mayonnaise and shredded cheese.
Lettuce and mushroom salad, with cucumber on the side.

Muffin cake, made with leftover spaghetti squash.  I made sure the squash would disappear into the cake by blending it in the food processor along with the liquid ingredients. Spaghetti squash is pretty bland, so if you try this, make sure you add enough spices, or some raisins or something.

What's for supper? Chinese Beef Thing and Baked Squash Doughnuts

Sounds luscious, doesn't it?

Actually, this was the menu:

Rouladen-cut beef (we get it already flattened at the store--resembles minute steaks), cut in strips, cooked slowly in a covered skillet with hoisin sauce, beef broth, and a chunk of ginger, and with frozen green beans added towards the end
Brown rice

Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts, but made with a mixture of cooked butternut squash and apple butter because we didn't have any canned pumpkin.  It worked fine!

Frugal substitute: Leftover Sweet Potato Cake

Southern cooks have done this for years--used pureed (cooked) sweet potato where Northerners might use pumpkin, such as in pie.

But have you ever tried it in Pumpkin Cake? It works very well. Just make sure you puree the sweet potato very well--you can mix all the wet ingredients in the blender or food processor, just to be sure. I added a sprinkle of cinnamon-sugar on top before baking--sweet potato always tastes good with a bit of extra cinnamon.

Beats putting out a couple of dollars for a can of pumpkin.

(And of course you can do the same thing with any winter squash that you can get to puree smooth.)

What's for supper? Butternut Fries

Did you ever notice how interchangeable sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and certain kinds of squash are?  You can use any of them for pies, muffins, soups...and now oven fries.  We've made sweet potato fries before, but had never tried squash fries.  But the farm stand, about to close for the season, had all their squash at two-for-one prices, so we picked up a couple of extra butternuts on the weekend.  And just before I was about to stick one of them in the oven this afternoon, I saw this recipe at Tea Time with Annie Kate (with a link to where she got the idea at Fresh Local and Best).

I used olive oil, and seasoned them with paprika and a very little salt.  They don't get too mushy as long as you keep the heat high enough.

So the dinner menu was:

Honey-Mustard Chicken (one of the easiest things I know how to do with chicken)
Butternut Squash Oven Fries
Peas

Apple Cake (made from this muffin recipe, without the raisins or the streusel topping)

Baking with "spaghetti-pumpkin"

Our Apprentice went to a youth group pumpkin event last weekend, and brought home a carved creation that, unfortunately, collapsed shortly thereafter due to structural difficulties.

She offered the bottom of it to me for cooking, and there was quite a bit of veggie still there so it did seem a shame to waste it. The pumpkin piece was about as big as our round pizza pan, so I put them both, with a bit of water, into the toaster oven (at 350 degrees).

When it came out and I was scooping the cooked squashy stuff into a bowl, I noticed that the texture was more like stringy spaghetti squash than either the smaller pie pumpkins or the canned pumpkin I've used before. I wasn't sure how that would work in the Pumpkin Loaf I planned to make with it. So when I baked the next day, I put all the wet ingredients (including the cooked pumpkin) into the food processor and blended them together before adding the dry ingredients. You could use a blender too.  (Obviously you could process or blend the pumpkin by itself, but I think dispersing it with the other wet ingredients gave the mixture a smoother texture.  If you prefer a few lumps, process for a shorter time.)

And the pumpkin loaf turned out fine--actually better than usual. I like the fresh taste of "real" pumpkin in baking.

Using the "kitchen slaves" to blend ingredients with a less-than-ideal texture may not be terribly original...but it worked for me.

It's pumpkin time too (Pumpkin Bars)

Needing to keep this weekend's grocery list on the light side, I nevertheless wrote down "can of pumpkin," because I wanted to try a new recipe for pumpkin bars.

Then I realized we had a pie pumpkin from Monday's Thanksgiving dinner. I bought it to cook in the first place, but it got lost in the pumpkin-and-maple-leaf scenery.

So I baked Mr. Pumpkin during school today, pureed it with an immersion blender, and ended up with two cups of cooked pumpkin--exactly what was needed to make the pumpkin bars. And now we have pumpkin bars on the counter, and some in the freezer (the recipe makes a big panful).

The author suggests an orange-cream cheese frosting, but that's fancier than we wanted. I just sprinkled the batter with a bit of extra cinnamon sugar before baking. Or you can leave it plain.

Peter's Pumpkin Bars, from The Perfect Basket by Diane Phillips

4 large eggs
1 2/3 cups sugar (I cut it back a bit)
1 cup oil
2 cups cooked pumpkin
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice mix (homemade version is given in the book; I used 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/4 tsp. nutmeg, 1/4 tsp. cloves)
1 tsp. baking soda

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and grease a 15 x 10-inch jelly-roll pan. In the large bowl of an electric mixer (or just a regular large bowl), beat together eggs, sugar, and oil. Gradually add the pumpkin, beating until smooth. Add the flour, baking powder, spices, and baking soda, and stir until the mixture is smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cut in squares. (Sprinkle before baking as described above, or cool and frost.)