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.

Easter food, in progress

 Orange-flavoured cream cheese candy

 Lemon-flavoured cream cheese candy

 Cake in a pizza pan, ready to add fruit and other toppings tomorrow

 Sauce cooking for Tofu-Almond Lasagna

 Lasagna, assembled. I will bake it tomorrow.

Sweet potato salad.

What do you eat at Easter? (updated)

The local supermarket ads always feature any ethnic feast or holiday that's going on. When it's not your own tradition, the reasons for the specific foods they're featuring are quite mysterious. Why does this or that Indian festival require this or that vegetable, or that dessert? What are they going to make with those big sacks of rice and flour that are on sale?

So with that in mind, I find the Easter-week ads amusing. What do non-Easter-celebrating people make of the fact that cream cheese is almost always featured, along with eggs? I'm not even sure what we're meant to do with that: cream cheese icing for carrot cake? Cheese cake? Cheese balls?

There are frozen vegetables, fruit pies, vanilla ice cream, cases of pop, cake mix, Pillsbury rolls on sale. Stuffing mix and spices. Clamato juice (I don't think I have ever had that, not even once). Ham, lamb, and turkeys. Pots of spring flowers. Bacon, I suppose to eat with the eggs or pancakes at your Easter Brunch.

Well, anyway, here's our extended-family menu for Sunday dinner this year.

Turkey if we can find one, or ham if we can't
Sweet potato salad from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home
Carol Flinders' Tofu-Almond Lasagna
Salad that my sister-in-law is bringing
Raw veggie plate
Kiffle (jam-filled Easter rolls, but we're using this roll dough this year)

Fruit pizza (white vegan cake baked in a pizza pan, with strawberry jam sauce and fresh fruit on top)
Maybe another dessert from my sister-in-law
Maybe some other fresh fruit or candies if we have some.

Something to drink.

Besides the family dinner, we have a "Paska Party" at church before the service on Easter morning, which means, mostly, coffee and sweet breads, or whatever people want to bring. I am probably going to take cream cheese mints (the gf people at church like them, and I had already bought some of that mysterious cream cheese on sale) and some of our kiffle. For Friday we don't usually buy hot cross buns since nobody except me likes those weird bits of peel and stuff in them, but I did make Carrot Spice Cupcakes (updated link 2023) (more like muffins) for a treat.

(The Apprentice wanted to know why the texture of the muffins was lighter than most of our muffins. It's sort of a hybrid recipe, halfway between cake and muffin batter, with two eggs. Also, I used one cup whole wheat flour and the rest ground-up rolled oats. I have made them with just ground-up oats, too. The recipe calls for coconut, nuts, and raisins in addition to carrots, but I left those out; and I changed the spices a bit, left out the ginger but added a bit of cloves and allspice.)

What's for supper? Back to our veggie roots

When we were first married, we had more vegetarian meals than meat ones; especially quick things we could make after work. Green Spaghetti and Chickpea Patties were two of our standbys. We found the Chickpea Patties recipe in a 1991 Vegetarian Times article; there's a recipe for Green Spaghetti in the same article, but we make ours differently--more cheese.

So that's what we had tonight:

Green Pasta (we used fusilli)
Chickpea Patties
Carrot sticks.

Green Pasta

I measured out the ingredients tonight as I went, so that I could write it down; but the amounts are really variable. I happened to have a whole block of cream cheese (bought on sale), but it's not necessary to use quite that much. We had enough leftovers to fill a casserole dish.

1 8-oz. block cream cheese
1/3 cup cottage cheese
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
5 oz. mozzarella, cut up
1 tbsp. margarine (probably not necessary with all that cream cheese)
1/4 tsp. or more black pepper (or grind some on at the table)
bit of garlic powder
leftover cooked broccoli (entirely optional)
1 6-oz. package fresh spinach (but frozen would work too)
Approximately 1 lb. hot pasta

What you want to do is have hot drained pasta, hot just-cooked spinach, and the blended mixture of cheeses all ready to mix at the same time. You don't have to cook the finished mixture; the heat of the pasta and spinach warms up the sauce ingredients.

I started the pasta cooking, had the spinach rinsed, and then put everything else into the food processor and got it pretty much blended. When the pasta was done, I let it drain in a colander and cooked the spinach in the same pot for a few minutes, steaming in its own rinse water. When it was wilted, I ran it through the food processor with the rest of the sauce mixture. Then, in a BIG bowl (or you could use the pasta/spinach pot again), I mixed everything together. If you think you might have cooked too much pasta, mix it into the sauce mixture gradually until you have the proportions you want. Serve as soon as possible.

Linked from 4 Moms Share Vegetarian Recipes.

The DHM's Five Things, and Cooking By the Campfire

The Five Things part is a meme that the Deputy Headmistress sent our way. Cooking by the Campfire comes at the end, so hold on.

5 Things in my Refrigerator:
1. Head of broccoli
2. Package of tofu
3. A last bit of smoked Jarlsberg cheese (one of my favourites)
4. Half a pan of no-bake brownies (recipe below)
5. Last night's leftover Scoobi-Doos (coloured macaroni spirals)

5 Things in my Closet
1. Framed family photos we don't have anywhere to hang
2. A couple of toys that are "doing time" (confiscated)
3. The kids' too-big-too-small shoe box
4. About three dresses that need to be dry-cleaned
5. and two that need to be ironed.

5 Things in my Purse:
1. Library cards
2. Loonies and twonies
3. Boring stuff like keys.
4, 5. Dustballs.

5 Things in My Car
1. Mr. Fixit
2. Mama Squirrel
3. The Apprentice
4. Ponytails
5. Crayons

No-Bake Brownie Recipe (from Vegetarian Times)

I've doubled this recipe to make enough for an 8-inch square pan, but you could always cut it in half again.

In a saucepan, combine 6 tbsp. powdered milk with 2/3 cup water. (Or use regular milk.) Heat the milk, not to boiling but just quite warm. Stir in approximately 12 oz. chocolate chips (if you're short, you can make up the difference with a couple of unsweetened chocolate squares, or cut back on the total amount a bit), and stir just until melted and smooth. Stir in about 2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs, and press into a greased square pan. (The original recipe called for nuts, but we leave those out). Chill until set, or just set aside if you don't have a refrigerator (the recipe was part of an article on camp food). Cut in squares. [2012 update: we have also discovered that these taste good if you stir in some mini-marshmallows at the end.  More like S'more.]

Oh, the wonders of the Internet: I knew that recipe I'd clipped was from a 1995 VT article by Jasmine Star, and a Google search for her name brought up the whole article online. It has lots of tips, grocery lists and recipes for campfire cooking, particularly for vegetarians. (I have not cooked over a campfire myself for a long time--we are pretty much homebody squirrels these days, and the closest we get is cooking over a barbecue.)