Best Thing Since Slipper Socks

Thanksgiving is coming up, and there is nothing I love more on Thanksgiving than paying homage to the pilgims and eating squash. What I mean is: if you look at a cornucopia, there squash is, with all of its other gourd brothers, looking regal and fun. Squash has staying power. The pilgrims knew it, my mother (squash-fanatic) knows it, and I (after a recent squash revelation) know it too.

Here’s my thing about squash: if you put 7 squash dishes in a room and prepared them totally differently from one another, added cinnamon sugar to this dish, and pimento cheese to that, you will find that no two dishes will taste the same. You can very easily add variety, while still maintaining the seedy goodness of the vegetable, because squash is a chameleon of a food. In short, squash lets you transform it however you want to transform it and doesn’t say, “This isn’t me at all.”

Every Thanksgiving and Christmas for about ten years, my mother has made a squash casserole that is TO DIE FOR. She mixes pureed squash, sour cream, pimento cheese, butter, and tops it with a breadcrumb mixture, bakes it for 45 minutes. The product is this dynamic, crumble of a casserole with a fanbase. On holidays, both sides of the family know it’s coming, and when she walks in the door, holding the Tupperware dish with two potholders, they clear a space for it with a sort of urgency I didn’t know a side dish deserved. But, it does deserve a place cleared for it, and if I can continue being dramatic about how good it is: it deserves to be right by the turkey. (Maybe even ahead of it) If she had a specialty, squash casserole would be it. Because of this, I will not be making the casserole, because it isn’t mine to make. But while I’m home for the holidays, I will document the magic, and post it for you--recipe, flip-flop print cooking aprons and all.

This Thanksgiving, I’m going to be trying out another squash recipe on my family, bringing it with me to Dillon, SC, where we go for lunch. I’m bringing it as a sort of sister-wife to the casserole, because, while it is squash, it is worlds away from my mother’s dish. They are (after getting word of my food blog) expecting something inventive and tangible. I'm proving myself this year. So, I will give them the acorn squash.

I remember the night I first got wind of this recipe. It was November in Wilmington, NC and my friend Emily, who I mentioned in an earlier post, invited me over to her house to do “Fall things”. There was nothing bizarre about the nature of the invite, in fact, we would very often label our hang-out sessions: “Night of Summer Things” “Night of Irresponsible Things” “Night of Girly Things." It was just something we did. That night, I went over, she greeted me in the hall with a pair of slipper socks in a small gift bag, we made acorn squash in the oven and gawked over Cameron Diaz’s wide array of peacoats in The Holiday. I may have lost the slipper socks (sorry, Em!) but I have kept this recipe with me ever since.

Just a note: If I were to categorize this recipe, I would place it under dessert or whatever category sweet potatoes fall under.

Hazelnut Acorn Squash
1 large acorn squash
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp brown sugar
small package of chopped hazelnuts

First, horizontally half the acorn squash. You will, without a doubt, need the largest machete in your drawer.

Scoop the stringy pulp and seeds out of the squash cavities. In a small mixing bowl, combine softened butter and brown sugar.

Coat the insides of the squash with the combined mixture and place on baking sheet. These are so pretty. I can't even handle it!

Bake at 400 for one hour until squash is tender when mashed with a fork. Sprinkle hazelnuts on top. Enjoy!

Done (White) Whining

A near-stranger recently asked me which ethnic restaurants I’d tried since I moved to Fairfax in August. The conversation went this way:

Me: I haven’t really tried out a lot of places since I’ve been here. In fact, I think I’ve been out to dinner like, three times since I moved, and two of the times, I went to Olive Garden.

Him: You unironically go to Olive Garden?

While I’m sure all the Indian restaurants and Vietnamese restaurants are to die for, and I would even go so far as to say, I can’t wait to try them, I doubt I’ll ever make Olive Garden a secondary option. The reason being: I-am-head-over-heels-can’t-get-enough-of-could-survive-for-a-year-off-of PASTA.

Pasta is the everything dish. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want, it is more versatile than any food has any right to be, it pairs well with everything, it makes for a good leftover and it’s pretty to look at pre or post-preparation. Did I mention the versatility?

Before I could even say “spaghetti’, I was eating it weekly. When I was 6, it was “psketti” or simply, “sketti”. On “Psketti Night”, my mother would suggest I put “old clothes” on before dinner, just in case I spilled, and we ate it with corn and applesauce. As a young teenager, I still changed my clothes before dinner, and we ate it with salad and garlic bread. And then, in my late teens, we began using wheat noodles instead of white, spaghetti became “spawheati," I stopped changing my clothes and started being cautious instead, and we simply had salad.

It is necessary to say I haven’t grown out of pasta, but I did (a few months ago) grow tired of the ways in which I prepared it. In my kitchen, I knew pasta noodles to be fashioned one way: smothered in Ragu and bits of hamburger meat. There were a million other quick, healthy and inventive ways to use noodles. There had to be.

My Goal: find one easy pasta recipe that makes as much sense in my kitchen as spawheati

Qualities I’m Looking For: no spaghetti sauce, near-impossible to mess up, no obscure ingredients, healthy.

I began talking to people about pasta. As bizarre and/or annoying as that sounds, my friends have accepted that I have become less Lindsey: Their Friend Who Cooks and more Lindsey: The Food Blogger. Specifically, my friend Ryan: graduate student in Chicago, omnipresent Facebook persona, and naysayer-turned-supporter of The Walnut Street Eats. We were talking one afternoon, not about my blog, not even about pasta, when he said, “I made a great white wine pasta last night.”

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said, “good.”

He began to list off ingredients, a step-by-step recipe and immediately I knew this was the answer to all my pasta woes. I bought ingredients that afternoon, made the dish in under thirty minutes, and was fanatical over the result. So, this week I’m thanking you, Ryan, for experimenting in your kitchen, so I could make magic in mine.

Ryan's White Wine Pasta
1 defrosted boneless, skinless chicken breast
1/2 cup white wine (of your choice)
1/2 cup water
thin whole grain spaghetti
1/2 yellow squash
1/2 zucchini
fresh spinach
minced garlic
pinch or two of flour
tbsp butter
tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

In a small pot, combine 1/2 cup white wine and 1/2 cup water. Bring to a light boil, then reduce heat and let simmer for ten minutes. Add tbsp of butter, tbsp of olive oil and a few pinches of flour, salt and pepper to taste. (Be careful not to add too much flour. If you do, your white wine sauce will go from being light and delicious to clumpy and weird. You can't serve clumpy and weird to company, can you?) It should look like this:

Slice zucchini and squash thinly, and cut your defrosted chicken into small squares. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

In a medium saucepan, combine a "shot" of olive oil with a tsp of minced garlic, or a few cloves of garlic, whichever you prefer. On medium-low heat, begin to sautee zucchini, squash, and chicken until vegetables are tender and chicken has thoroughly cooked.

Once vegetables are tender and chicken is cooked, add fresh spinach, as much or as little as you like.

When spinach has softened, top all ingredients over thin whole grain spaghetti, and drizzle white wine sauce on top. Enjoy!

Feeding Myself

The first time I went grocery shopping without my parents, I bought macaroni and cheese, cereal (I forgot the milk), and sliced turkey (I forgot the bread). It was August 2005, and the day before, I wailed in the parking lot of a Ruby Tuesday’s, begging my parents to take me back home with them.

“I can start college next year!” I cried.

They told me to stop being silly, and waved from behind the windows until they were out of sight.

That afternoon, I wasn’t crying about how terrible I was at feeding myself, but I should have been. In the following year, I perused the grocery store for two hours, buying virtually nothing of any substance, and leaving with 75 dollars less than when I’d entered.

Sitting in front of the TV, canned ravioli atop a television tray, I’d wonder where all my money was going. Why was I coming home, bags of food lining my arms, and running back to the store a week later for the same routine? In an alternate universe where adults with supermarket-intuition all lived together, there was, I assumed, a more successful way to eat.

Self-sufficiency is funny that way. I was never aware of how young I was, how underprepared to take good care of myself, until I was eighteen years old, in a dorm room beside my best friend, eating ramen noodles and drinking apple juice for dinner. In a house where my parents lived, some 100 miles south, dinner made sense, and it may have been because I never saw it in process, only complete, on the table waiting to be eaten.

I’d like to say “it was all so tough, and then I grew up”, like learning how to cook was this transformative thing, and the right ways to do it came to me in a dream, but that’s not true. I ate terribly for years: processed food, easy food, fast food, inexpensive food. There are nights that I ate “dinner sides”, a bowl of mashed potatoes, for example

In 2007, I met Emily Brown, a creative writing major like me, a native of Suffolk, Virginia, and a self-proclaimed cooking queen. We became instant friends. On weeknights after class, she’d invite me over and we’d experiment in the kitchen. Sometimes, we’d make “throw-together meals”, a way to use food in the refrigerator before it went bad. Other nights, we’d plan a meal ahead of time, go to the grocery store together and split the cost. We had potlucks, and soup cook offs, and grill outs. We made cinnamon acorn squash, tons of pasta, and homemade pizza. Over the years I spent in Emily Brown’s kitchen, I learned many things: how to use a garlic press, the versatility of spaghetti sauce, and the glory of leftovers. Most of all, though, and I have kept this with me ever since, I learned how to feed myself.

There is something to be said about being a serious cook. I don’t mean a Rachel Ray type, or a behind-the-scenes culinary artist at a high-end restaurant you love. I mean, grocery shopping like its an artform: preparing your meals for the week, compiling a list of ingredients that can be used again and again, and sticking to your guns in the middle of the aisle: buying what you need, and only what you need (Maybe a treat or two!) Then, having that same seriousness carry over into your own kitchen, allowing yourself time to learn and to burn things, but believing that, eventually, you will remove something outstanding from your oven. Not anyone else’s oven, yours.