Sweet Squash

Saturday, November 03, 2007

I’m on a quest to master winter squash before spring.  It’s a vegetable staple for local foods eating through the long stretch until those first greens are popping up.  Even though our garden is still producing quite a bit of stuff, we’ve been eating the loads of butternut and acorn squash that we picked for about a month now.  I’m always on the lookout for new ways to use it, and my latest attempt was a butternut squash soufflé (recipe).

The squash and sage were from our garden, and the eggs were local.  The only tweak I made to the recipe was to reduce the white sugar from ¼ cup down to one tablespoon. And, really, even that tablespoon was pretty unnecessary given how sweet the squash is on its own.  As an aside, have you noticed how all of the recipes in Southern Living are a bit Paula Dean-esque with the butter, sugar and shortening?  My mother-in-law sends me some good recipes from that magazine but I’ve got to wonder if people really eat that much sugar at dinner. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using a recipe from a Southern magazine on a Northeastern local foods blog.) Anyway, the soufflé was creamy and fluffy, and the sage and nutmeg were nice complements to the squash.  It would be lovely in individual ramekins. Gotta get some of those!