Roasted Butternut Squash with a Nut-and-Cheese Filling

What’s the difference between a butternut squash and a pumpkin?

Pumpkins

~ Are round with a flattened top and bottom. It has green stripes and can be transformed into a glass carriage if you have a fairy godmother.

~ Grow with the least care and negligence on a small strip of land beside your house. Needless to say perhaps, that has to be in a warm tropical country. They grow even when you accidentally or deliberately damage their stems while deweeding your garden.

~ If you love (to eat) their flowers, you normally build a vine for them to grow well. And then you might have 2 or 3 of them growing after 3 or more months of waiting.

~ Are the most wanted during Halloweens. Then, they grow to sizes of enormous balloons and roll from one side of the store to the other. This is the time when you do not much care what colour is its inside, that is, if it’s ripe.

~ If you have had a grandmother with a sharp eye on the fruits and vegetables maturing in your garden, you probably had the sweetest, crunchiest memories of pumpkin fries in gram flour dips or a side dish of lightly fried shredded pumpkins with onion seeds.

Butternut Squash

~ Looks almost like pumpkins probably because they belong to the same family. Wikipedia informs, however, that the butternut squash originates in and around Mexico while pumpkins come from South America. And I thought pumpkins are found only in India.

~ For the uninitiated, it looks similar to pumpkins, except a tad smaller. And if you had been missing fresh vegetables in a very cold country where almost’ every fruit and vegetable available in the stores is frozen and enveloped in neat plastic wraps (I said, almost), you might jump in for that last pumpkin on the corner shelf of an ethnic shop, however small, discoloured or dusty it might look, with all the eagerness of a starving woman, and without realising for a miniscule moment that you are picking up the cousin.

~ And when it’s time to cook that so-thought pumpkin, and you peel it, dice it or shred it, and pick up a recipe from 'mom's hundred ways to cook pumpkins', you discover that Norwegian 'pumpkins' are butter soft, they start to melt away as soon as you start frying it, in about 1/10th of the time needed to fry an actual pumpkin. It might be months together before you realise that your foreign pumpkin is not a pumpkin at all but a butternut squash. Take note.

~ And then a whole wide world opens before you. Butternut squash. A fruit that readily lends itself to, probably, a thousand recipes ranging over cakes and pies and breads and gratins and curries and roasts. Wonderful even if it’s simply roasted and just with a hint of melted butter and flaky salt. Just like that. And then you discover that you don’t miss pumpkin at all (never did). Except when it comes to those fries in gram flour dips or a side dish of lightly fried shredded pumpkins with onion seeds.

Did I also tell you about those seeds? If you were fascinated by the nutty, crunchy pumpkin seeds, you now have an alternative. And a way better one at that.

Here’s how I treat these butternut squash seeds:

1. Use a blunt knife or an ice cream scoop to scrape out the seeds from the curve of the squash. Wash them thoroughly, pat them dry, and spread them out on paper towels to dry further.

2. When the moisture is all gone, (this might take up to a day), I pack them in an airtight container.

3. When ready for it, simply toast them in the microwave for 4 to 5 minutes at medium, taking care to stir them every minute or two or put them in the oven for 5 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Be careful though because these tend to pop and crackle a lot.

4. Use them in your breads, cakes, pies, as you use other nuts, or simply snack on them.

5. If you are looking for salted seeds, boil them in salted water before you dry and toast them.

Roasted Butternut Squash with a Nut-and-Cheese Filling

~~ Barely adapted, highly inspired from 101 Cookbooks and The Vegetarian Compass

I saw this recipe first on Heidi’s 101 Cookbooks, where she said she adapted it from Karen Hubert Allison’s The Vegetarian Compass. And I immediately knew I had to make this. It was such a beautiful, creative idea. Who would ever think of a pudding in a squash? It was rather dorky of me to wait for so long. And when I did, I had to change almost all the ingredients that Heidi or Karen used. Reason being my two darlings - an allergic toddler and a vegetarian friend.

So the first ones to be scratched out from the recipe were those eggs. I used butternut squash, despite their small bowls, simply because that was available. A butternut squash waits in my pantry at all times. And except those nutmeg and olive oil, I threw in a totally separate mix of ingredients. And there were no regrets – only a delicious experience.

What do you need?

~ Butternut squash – 1 medium, cut lengthwise in halves
~ Olive oil – 1/2 teaspoon
~ Butternut squash seeds – 1/3 cup, toasted and ground. Alternatively, use almonds or cashew nuts, same quantity
~ Nutmeg – ¼ teaspoon, freshly powdered
~ Ricotta or cottage cheese – 150 g, it came up to about a cup
~ Sour cream – 2 teaspoons (optional)
~ Onions or shallots – 1 medium, finely chopped
~ Sundried tomatoes – 3 slices, soaked and pasted
~ Lemon zest or fresh cilantro or basil – 1 teaspoon (optional)
~ Sea or kosher salt and pepper – as per taste
~ Parmesan cheese – 2 teaspoons, grated

What should you do?

1. Scrub well the squash skin, pat it dry with a kitchen towel, and brush the fleshy side with olive oil. Check that it sits primly or slash the bottom with a sharp knife.

2. Warm up oven to 180 degrees Celsius and roast the squash, covered with an aluminium foil, for 15 to 20 minutes. The butternut squash gets cooked comparatively faster. We need something like a tender squash, not completely cooked through, at this stage.

3. Use a fork to crumble the cheese. If yours is store bought ricotta, you might need to mix in the sour cream to soften and smoothen it. Mix in the ground nuts or seeds, the nutmeg powder, chopped onions, sundried tomato paste, zest or herbs, and seasonings. I used my all-rounder hand held mixer to bring everything to a coarse paste. ~ Note: Next time, I am going to slice the onions, caramelize them in a little olive oil, and mix in.

4. Spoon the mixture into the semi-roasted squash bowls. I filled it to the top and since the filling didn’t have much liquid, there was no fear of running over or trickling. Bake at 180 degree Celsius for 30 minutes or until the top starts to brown and the squash is completely cooked.

5. Just about 2-3 minutes before it’s done, sprinkle the fillings with the grated parmesan and turn on the broiler/grill mode of your oven. The parmesan will slightly puff up and form a layer on the top.

And then there would be leftovers. Fillings leftovers. I was very much in the mood to spoon these in halved paprikas or tomatoes, but had to be satisfied with paper muffin cups, as Heidi again wisely suggested; it being one of those days when I was trying to empty my fridge before hitting the open air vegetable markets. If there was any in cold and damp Trondheim. I just meant, the superstores.

A note of caution: If you are using squash seeds for the first time, taste them firstto be sure that you like them. They would be chewy, crucnhy, and the skins can be a little on the rough side. Not bad. Keep an eye on the oven temperature and the squash because the cooking time could vary. Once again, butternut squash cooks comparatively faster, but be sure that it’s finally, completely cooked.

What do you think are the differences between pumpkins and butternut squashes? Is it possible to use these interchangeably in recipes? What are the limitations? More recipes? People, enlighten me while I am working on that gratin.