So Leta was all about making recipes from her cookbook library, and I was looking for incentives to find more vegetarian options, so in a moment of weakness I said that I would join the project, too. At first my intention was just to work through The Vegetarian Epicure—sort of a low-rent Julie/Julia Project. But there are a lot of wheat-based recipes in that book, and I would like to share some of this cooking with Leta. And, while I have a lot of free time for food preparation now, I hope to be more fully occupied outside of the home soon. So I will skip around the shelf.
But I did start with this squash concoction. Maybe because I had already bought the acorn squash and was looking for something interesting to do with it.
Oriental Citrus Squash
- 3 small acorn squashes
- butter
- 1/2 cup orange marmalade
- 1 Tbs. candied ginger, cut into very small pieces
- 1 Tbs. lemon juice
- pinch of nutmeg
Cut the squashes in half lengthwise, remove the seeds, brush them with butter, place them cut-side down on a greased pan, and bake about 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Fill the cavities with a mixture of the marmalade, the minced ginger, lemon juice, and nutmeg, and bake 15 minutes more. Serve very hot.
6 servings.
This came out fairly well, considering how much I tinkered with the proportions. First off, I had one large squash, not three small ones, as I was just cooking for myself. And my approach to the lemon juice was a little excessive. I bought one lemon expressly for the recipe, and I didn’t foresee any other uses for the juice, so I used all the juice of the lemon. And since I was going heavy on the juice, I sort of guessed on the amount of marmalade. That’s a lot of jelly to be stuffing these squashes with. The resulting mixture came out as sort of a citrus soup. Tasty enough, not very gingery: some of my condiments are a little stale.
Trick learned: cutting the squash lengthwise. This is a good idea, even if it’s harder to do (I need to sharpen my all-purpose knife.) All this time, I’ve been cutting acorn squash around its middle, which means that the two filled halves won’t sit up straight in the baking pan.