Preppy

I'm sort of an impatient cook. I love the process of combining, adding heat, seasoning and the like, but I really don't like prep work. I just find it tedious. I want to get down to business and cook. I don't mind chopping the occasional onion or clove of garlic, or peeling a few potatoes, but some foods are just so needy in the prep department.

Take butternut squash. Not only do you have to peel it, but the peel scores off the charts in a Knoop hardness test. Because of its shape, you have to separate the neck from the bulbous bottom and cut them up separately. The seeds have to be scraped out of the cavity, which always leaves a weird slimy-yet-dry film on my hands, and then the whole thing has to be cut into chunks. What a drag.

But last week I had bought a butternut squash (because despite the hassle of getting it ready, I love it), and it was just lying there on the kitchen counter, staring at me. It was almost as though it was challenging me to take it on. "C'mon, ya wimp," I could almost hear it say, "let's go." I haven't been getting enough sleep lately.

I tackled that squash, chunked it up, and stuck it in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator. Vanquished! But it was a hollow victory. I mean, you know, now what?

Interestingly, a memory of a failed vegetable lasagna wafted through my mind. It had seemed like such a good idea, but it had been a complete flop; not enough sauce and the pan the recipe called for had been far too big for the noodles and vegetables. It wound up being a sort of mound of barely moistened mush in a vast sea of enameled cast iron. I was kind of surprised too, because it came from a magazine that usually has pretty decent recipes (I won't point fingers, but the magazine's name rhymes with Hooking Plight). Could I do better?

Well I won't keep you in suspense: turns out I could. Using an idea from another set of recipes from that same magazine (successful ones, of course), I made a bang-up Roasted Butternut Squash and Pancetta Lasagna. It had started out to be just a roasted squash lasagna, but Carl Carnivore (aka the guy I married) asked for some kind of protein in it.

I roasted the squash with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and baked off the pancetta. In the first iteration of this recipe, I just cooked the pancetta to a fare-thee-well and crumbled it up. That worked OK, but it made the end result pretty salty, I thought (and for me to say something is salty means that it probably had a salinity level somewhere around that of the Dead Sea). The second time I made sure that the amount of pancetta was controlled--I limited it to 1/4 pound, whereas the first time I just chucked in everything I had on hand, which was probably closer to a third of a pound.

This recipe makes four servings (albeit fairly large ones; I've found that a half serving is ample for lunch). The creamy sauce that binds it is actually surprisingly low in fat because of the evaporated milk used, although with the pancetta, mozzarella and parmesan it doesn't necessarily qualify as a low fat recipe. Still, if you were restrained with the amount of cheese you used, you could get away with calling this reasonably healthy.

So the next time you have a butternut squash staring you in the face, challenging you to a smack-down, grab some pancetta and sage, and start prepping. I can't give you any quick and easy tips on peeling butternut squash--I just gnash my teeth and snarl through it--but I can say that this is a great thing to do with it when you've conquered it.

Butternut Squash and Pancetta Lasagna
makes 4 dinner servings, or two dinner servings and four lunch servings

1 butternut squash (about 3 cups peeled and cubed)
1/4 pound pancetta
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 - 12 oz cans evaporated skim milk
1/4 cup chopped fresh sage
1/3 cup shredded parmesan cheese
2/3 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
6 no boil lasagna noodles
olive oil
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Toss squash with 2-3 tablespoons olive oil, salt and pepper in a 9" x 13" roasting pan. Roast until squash is browning on the edges and corners, about 40 minutes. Cook pancetta in a 9" x 13" roasting pan until quite crisp, 15-20 minutes.

Melt butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and whisk for about 3 minutes to take the raw flour edge off, but not enough to brown the flour. All at once add both cans evaporated skim milk and whisk to combine. Cook about 5 minutes, then add chopped sage, parmesan, salt and pepper (go easy on the salt--remember, you've got that salty pancetta going in; the sauce should have just enough salt not to taste bland, but not so much that it tastes actually salty). Cook until the sauce is thickened, about the consistency of half and half (if it reaches the consistency of heavy cream, it's slightly too thick--add some milk to thin). This will take about ten or 15 minutes.

In an 8" square pan coated with cooking spray, cover the bottom with about 1/2 cup of the sauce. Place 2 no boil lasagna noodles on top of the sauce. Spoon half of the squash over the noodles, and scatter with four slices of the pancetta that have been crumbled into small pieces. Spoon another half cup (or so--a little more if necessary) of sauce over the filling. Top with two more noodles, squash and pancetta, and sauce. Place the last two noodles on top of the squash filling, and pour the remaining sauce over them. Top with the shredded mozzarella.

Bake at 450 for 25 minutes or until bubbling and cheese is browned. Allow to rest for 5-10 minutes. Cut into four pieces and serve.

Squash Soup!

I have replaced my squash soup recipe. Perhaps not permanently, but at least for near future. I’m hoping that my husband will like this one better than the old one. He wouldn’t eat the old one at all because he said it was too sweet. On careful reflection, I can’t actually replace my old recipe completely, because it was a very healthy version of squash soup, whereas this one is less so.

Previously when I made squash soup, it was from a recipe from an Eating Well magazine. The article had two outstanding soup recipes that both used vegetables that had been roasted in the oven, and then made into soup. One of them was a roasted tomato soup, the other was roasted squash and pear soup. I discovered these recipes back in about 1997, and then lost both of them in a tragic upgrade incident.

I had been using a computer software called MasterChef, which had its own built in cookbook (pre-loaded with recipes from Cooking Light, among other sources), but would also allow you to type in your own recipes as well. It had the usual features that this kind of software does—menu planning, nutritional analysis, grocery list creation. I spent hours happily typing in dozens of recipes so I could be rid of those pesky pieces of paper. Once they were all in, all the paper went straight into the garbage—welcome to the modern world! Who needs those bits of paper floating around? And if really do want a paper version, if someone should ask me for a copy of recipe or something like that, I have a printer!

Then one day, in a moment of sheer insanity, I upgraded our happy little Windows 95 machine to…Windows Me. No, I don’t recall why. All I remember is that from that day forward my MasterCook program, which (as you may have guessed) wasn’t designed to run on Me, wouldn’t work at all. All those recipes, all that work, gone. To this day I refuse to put recipes on a computer, and keep hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds of paper (in the form of books and magazines) around to keep track of my recipes.

So, the squash soup recipe was gone. I was sad, but resigned. At one point a website called Tavolo.com had many of the recipes from Eating Well (which by then had ceased publication). It had lots of their recipes, but not my soup (now, I find, their “recipes” section just has links to low rent sites like RachelRayMag.com). I finally decided it was gone forever. And then years later in a moment of startling boredom, I did a Google search for roasted squash and pear soup. Much to my delight, some blessed soul had entered it in to one of those “share your recipe” sites, and they’d even credited it to the October 1997 Eating Well so I knew for sure it was the right one. Oh joy! (And I would like to say thank you to Gail Shermyer, for posting that recipe and bringing a little sunshine to my life.)

I made it again, and my husband still didn’t like it. It has cinnamon and cardamom and brown sugar in it, and he thinks it makes the squash too sweet. He doesn’t mind butternut squash, but he doesn’t like it sweet. He blames the pears in this recipe, but they’re really not solely responsible. The pears and squash are roasted for about 45 minutes, then pureed and cooked with the spices and some sautéed shallots. It also has curry powder in it, which gives it a wonderful flavor to me.

But just a week or so ago, I discovered a new squash soup recipe in an issue of Fine Cooking magazine (my new magazine obsession—I’ve read Threads magazine by the same publisher plenty of times, and my husband even has a subscription to Fine Homebuilding, but I’d never really explored Fine Cooking before, and now I’m hooked!). This one called for squash, Granny Smith apple, and bacon. The bacon hooked me. I love bacon. I think you could put bacon in just about anything, except maybe ice cream or chocolate cake, and it would be outstanding. So I gave it a try. And it’s great.

The bacon fat is rendered, then the squash is sautéed in it to give it some depth of flavor, and then the apple and some sage are added, along with chicken broth. Then it’s pureed with half the cooked bacon that the fat came from, and the rest is scattered over the top of each bowl. It’s not one for my vegetarian friends, but is simply wonderful if you don’t mind some bacon fat.

I had an awkward moment when pureeing time came around, because I’ve managed to misplace my immersion blender in all this moving we’ve done. I can find the motor, but not the blade or the safety shield, so I was forced to use the blender. I’d rather have used the food processor, but someone grated about four pounds of cheese last night, and all the food processor parts are in the dishwasher, still dirty. I’m always afraid of using the blender because of all those warnings about the lid blowing off with the buildup of the steam from the hot soup. Like all those warnings about old pressure cookers blowing pea soup all over the ceiling—pressure cookers flat out scare me. Fortunately I managed to get the soup smooth without incident.

Anyway, while this recipe is clearly higher in fat and not really as healthy as the Eating Well version, it gets points for being faster. Once you get past the chore of peeling the squash (something I hate doing because I always wind up with a weird slick orange film on my fingers), the soup is ready pretty fast—within a half an hour. The Eating Well one requires the roasting portion, which means your soup takes more like an hour or more to make. Also, this new one has bacon. Did I mention the bacon? It has bacon.

So now I have a squash soup recipe for any occasion—trying to eat more healthfully; throwing caution to the wind; having vegetarians over for dinner; providing for hard-core carnivores. I think my husband will like it—it’s not too sweet, and he kind of has the same philosophy about bacon that I do. Now if I could just get my kids to eat it. But I guess we can’t have everything.