I've been hesitating to make a first post here, as E.T. and I have been conducting an ongoing email chain that describes every little detail of our cooking, canning, garden-growing experiments. I had all these grand ideas about what my first post should be - but I'll never actually be that grand and since E.T. is on a mini-vacation visiting her father and I can't share with her immediately my thoughts on creating tonight's recipe, it seems appropriate to bite the bullet and make a darn post.
Here goes...
Using this recipe for farfalle with pink banana squash and wild mushrooms, I embarked on a weeknight dinner experiment. Altering the menu to adjust to what I did have in the house, I substituted dry vermouth for the sherry (google searching revealed that it was a good option) and I used only chantrelles and these pretty little organic maitake mushrooms I found at Gelsons.
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| Aren't those maitakes pretty? |
Let me back up a bit. Four weeks ago (if memory serves) I was getting dropped off from work by my boss. As we rounded the corner and slowed to a stop, I observed a couple walking past our yard, stopping to look, and pointing. My hubby and I are quite proud of our yard - more of which you will be certain to hear about in great detail. So, with one proud eye on the observant couple I said my goodbyes. I began to approach our front gate and the couple turned around to ask, "Oh? Is this your house?" Thus began a long conversation about various garden-related items. this lead to an admittance on part of my newly-realized neighbor, that she only knows how to cook from her native Philippine repertoire. She and her husband brought up the fact that they only actually eat or cook squash blossoms and that they have this giant squash in their yard that they have no use for and wondered if I knew what it was (assuming, mistakenly, that I was some sort of squash know-it-all). The woman abruptly told her husband to go back and get it…which left me confused, since the strong accent made it difficult for me to understand absolutely everything I had heard…I had no idea what to expect when the husband returned. But sure enough, he comes running back with a gigantic yellowy-pink squash in his arms. He immediately handed it over to me and they hung out for a little while longer before they continued their walk. We shook hands, and I was left with this big mystery squash and some new neighborly pals. I felt so triumphant as I entered my house that evening.
Turns out this squash is a pink banana squash and it's supposedly sweeter than the butternut. Some searches tell me that this is an heirloom variety (I am now wondering if I should dig those seeds out of the compost bin and try to grown 'em in the public walk-way - no room in the small front yard for these giants!).
And so, four weeks later, I finally gave myself the permission to spend tonight making this large, large recipe. Apparently in order to use all of this squash in one recipe, the recipe itself, had to be quite large. And my weeknight stamina did not call for two separate kinds of squash meals.
Lesson one: wax paper is not parchment paper.
Lesson two: dry vermouth as it's cooking smells just like marsala wine! Yummmm.
Lesson three: wax paper burns when it's in the oven. I really should have deduced this prior to actually putting it in there. There's no excuse.
Lesson four: chiffonade is not a fancy prom dress, but a pretty way to cut herbs.
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| My proud chiffonade... |
A couple of things to note about my developing cooking style…
I like things very orderly and I like to clean as I go. This usually means that I am not a fast-paced cook or, if I am - my meal probably won't turn out. I blame this on my slight propensity for order or some call it mild OCD. I also blame this on my inexperience with cooking. If I were more comfortable with timing and the materials and foods I was working with, I could probably work faster. I am pretty sure that with experience, I'll still always prefer to keep things as tidy as possible. So, I always start out the cooking process by setting out all of the ingredients I'll need, in their called for proportions. The random salt, pepper or oil addition can be the only exception to my pre-proportioned rule. So, this means that I like to do all of my slice and dicing prior to any heat is turned on (Assuming my recipe calls for heat). My little bits of experience has shown me that I tend to panic and cut corners when I don't have everything prepared and available. For example, tonight's recipe called for the butter to be browned and then dipped into ice water, then separated, leaving the sediment behind to use later on. Well, I hadn't prepared the ice water bath prior to browning the butter, so I just played it by ear. This resulted in a bowl of hot brown butter, with a sauce pan slightly coated in "more brown" butter. This itty bitty mistake, threw me for a loop and when the next step to the recipe called for melted butter (not the browned melted butter, mind you) I threw in my set-aside bowl of sorta browned butter, leaving my regular melted butter waiting in the wings for the last part of the recipe. A minor mistake, I am aware, but it was a mistake that illustrates some of the ways in which a non-prepared Katy turns out a mildly-altered recipe.
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| All sliced and diced, just the way I like it! |
The final product? I am happy with it.
Quite tasty - very rich, and very sweet as well.
I couldn't quite place if the sweetness was due to the large amount of butter in the recipe, the large amount of sugar in the recipe, or the large amount of super-sweet squash with the butter and sugar in the recipe. Either way, I'm happy to report that the flavor was full and decadent.
