Winter Squash Recipe Roundup

Here's the thing about blog archives.  You can get lost in them, following one link after another after another.   I do this a lot on other blogs - and once in a while on my own.   It's fun seeing where a blog has been over the years.

Also, it's great collecting recipes from over the years.   I was looking for a winter squash soup recipe here from a couple of years ago and found these other terrific squash recipes along the way.  Family tested! Since we're smack in the middle of winter squash season, I figured you could use some of these.

Southern Style Pumpkin Chips  [Lemon Ginger Pumpkin Marmalade] - my favorite lemon marmalade recipe!

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

Pumpkin Maple Soup

Spicy Pumpkin Soup

Coconut Pumpkin Soup

All of these recipes can be made with any type of winter squash - pumpkin, butternut, Greek sweet red, etc.

Another Country Cat

I walked out of the house the other day and noticed that one of the squash had fur.

Nelly loves to curl up in things.  The shape of this giant rampicante squash was just her size.

She napped there for hours.

It was really quite adorable.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Coffeecake

Last fall we canned some pumpkin and it has been fantastic!  I pulled out a quart this week and asked Lily what we should make that wasn't too pumpkin-pie-ish.   This is what she came up with.   It was wonderful.    Seriously wonderful.

Basically it's three parts:  pumpkin, ginger spiced cake, and cream cheese chunks - all swirled together and baked.   Yum!

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Coffeecake 
www.rurification.com

1/2 cup butter
1 1/3 cup sugar

2 eggs
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp powdered ginger
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 8oz pkg cream cheese cut into small cubes
1 quart canned pumpkin

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375. Grease 9x13 pan.

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs.  Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and spices in separate bowl and gradually add to the butter/egg mixture alternating with the milk. Begin and end with the flour mix.   Pour the pumpkin into the bottom of the prepared pan. Fold the cream cheese into the batter and pour on top of the pumpkin. Swirl with a knife to marble the two.

Bake for 60 minutes or until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

Another Squash Update

Yeah, I know it's kind of obnoxious to keep posting pics of baby squash, but I have a little squash obsession and I think it's only fair to share it with you.   Some people show off pics of their kids and dogs, I show off pics of my squash.   It's a crazy world.

Also, excuse all the hands in the pics.  Not super attractive, but I wanted to give you an idea of how big they are getting.

This is Australian Butter Squash.   Sort of chunky and exactly the color of butter. This is our first time growing this one.  I can't wait to see how big it gets and what it tastes like. 

This one is Honeyboat Delicata.  It's pretty prolific.  I've got at least six fruit right now and they set pretty early.  They're a little longer than my hand.  I think they're supposed to turn more coppery when they're ready to harvest, so I'm waiting.  

This is Black Futsu.   I tried it last year and it finally set fruit in late September.  They were adorable and tiny but too late to ripen.   I decided to try again this year.   You can see how big this one is getting.   It'll have an orange area when it's ready.

This one is a summer squash - Golden Marbre Pattypan.   I love the stripes.   These get a bit bigger than my palm and dark yellow when they're ready.

And this one is a Musquee de Provence.  You can see how big it is already and it's just getting bigger.   I have two more big ones like this one.

The little white things are some volunteer baby white pumpkins.  We keep throwing the remains in with the chickens and every year we get more of them as volunteers from the chicken dirt we amend the garden with.  

Squash Update

So the truth is that I'm kind of in love with squash plants.  I love the way the bees buzz all over them.  I love the flowers, I love the fruit, I love the vines.  They crawl all over the garden and we have to leap frog over a lot of them but I don't care.   They make me happy.

This is winter squash Black Futsu with yesterday's flower, today's flower and tomorrow's from right to left.   It made me laugh. 

This is a baby Queensland Blue [left] and a baby Golden Hubbard [right].   They're a bit bigger than your fist in this pic, but they'll get a LOT bigger before they're done.   The QB will turn a lovely blue gray and the GH will turn a screaming traffic cone orange when they're ripe. 

And as always, I let a couple of  volunteer mystery squash stay this year.   This one is nice and smooth and regular and pretty pale.   Maybe another batch of the little white pumpkins that seem to volunteer so well in the chicken dirt?    I hope so - they make adorable decorations. 

Potential

A squash start from a couple of weeks ago.  I love this stage of growth.  It's all about potential.

Putting Up Squash

I canned my squash harvest this year against FDA recommendations.   Here's the FDA page if you want to look at it.  They don't even want you to can it with a pressure canner.

Note:  The FDA has recommendations for canning meat here.  

So, just to be clear, the FDA does think it's safe to pressure can meat, but not pumpkin.

[Eyebrow raised.]

I pressure canned my squash anyway.    I roasted it, did not puree it, packed it in quart jars, and filled it up with water leaving an inch headspace.   Then I processed it at 10 pounds of pressure for 80 minutes - just what the book for my canner recommended.  It's an old book that came with my canner, lo those many years ago when my mom bought it.

Note:   The processing called for on the FDA meat page link above, for raw chicken with bones is 10 pounds of pressure for 75 minutes.   Raw.  Chicken. 

I think I'm safe.

If I had an extra freezer, I'd freeze it but freezer space is at a premium.

Also,  things get lost in the freezer.  They go in and are never seen again, like agents going into the Escher Vault in Warehouse 13.    Mysterious dark forces are at work in there.   I just know it.  

Also, freezers are vulnerable to power outages.  It's a bad feeling knowing that the contents of your freezer are slowly thawing out and that every time you open it to try to use some up before it goes bad you're just hastening the inevitable.

So,  I'm trying to can more and freeze less.   Or at least freeze only things that I can easily and safely bottle up in a water bath canner over an open fire if I had to --- like fruit.  

UPDATE:  All of that pumpkin was delicious.   A current search [3/25/14] shows that the USDA now says it's perfectly fine to pressure can pumpkin in cubes now: http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_04/pumpkin_winter_squash.html
After you process them, they often fall apart and look just like puree.

Tendrils

The tendrils that grow
on squash vines are
some of the
prettiest things
that grow
in the garden.



Don't you think?

Zucchino Rampicante

One of the most fun and delicious squash we grow is the zucchino rampicante.   The two on the right are fully mature.  The one on the left is still a bit green.  They are big - almost the size of your arms if you hold them out and pretend you're holding a ball in front of you.

Rampicante is an Italian curly squash.  Aside from their way cool shapes, these guys are amazing in that you can eat them at any stage of growth from blossom to little green baby squash, to beige and fully ripe.    They are a combination summer/winter squash.

Pick them green and cook them like summer squash.

Pick them ripe and cook them like winter squash.    They have a delicious orange flesh that is wonderful sliced and baked.  

The seeds are in the bulb at the bottom.

To prepare them when they're fully ripe, peel it all with a vegetable peeler and slice the skinny part into rounds.   Cut the bulb off, open it, take out the seeds and slice it up.  Bake it until soft.

It's really delicious baked with some of the glazes I talked about last week. 

New Squash - Golden Hubbard

I think a vegetable garden should be full of all sorts of colors, not just 40 shades of green.  One of my favorite things this year is my very, very orange hubbard squash.   I've never grown hubbard before.

I tried, but no success until this year.   And this year,  this year!, I managed to get three of them.  I think it was the extra chicken dirt.

The kids call this the traffic cone squash.  That orange is really loud. 

This squash must be really tasty.   When I turned it over, I found a lot of little holes and marks where critters had been going at it.

If you look at these pics close up, you can see the teeth marks. 

Voles?  I find it equally cool and disturbing.  

Seriously, I can't make up my mind if I'm grossed out or jealous.   This must be some great squash. 

Note:  Rumor has it that when you store these, you should make sure the stem is completely off.   All other squashes store better with a couple of inches of stem on. 

New Squash - Queensland Blue

This is a baby Queensland Blue squash. 

I've tried to grow this before and gotten nothing, so I was pretty darned happy when I finally got a big one this year. 

We put extra chicken manure in the bed.   Apparently, it matters. 

I love that awesome shape.  

The big question is whether it is going to actually be blue or not.

A few weeks later, this is what I've got.

It's looking pretty blue.

Now I have to figure out what to do with it, because frankly, I've been so amazed at the transformation, that I forgot to see if we could eat it. 

I got the seed from Baker Creek.   If it's tasty, I'll do more next year because now I have to have blue squash.

Squash

The squash bed, looking back to the tomatoes.  The sweet potatoes are on the top left of the pic

This is totally a brag post. 

My squash bed is really gorgeous this year and it often isn't, so I pulled a few pics to show it off to you.

This has been a rough year for a lot of us and I've got friends whose squash has really suffered.   In addition to the heat, we regularly battle vine borers, squash bugs and poor soil.

Click on pic and look at it big.  Squash blossoms are cool.

I hate vine borers.   Things get up and going and gorgeous and I sprinkle my Dipel dust with bt in it religiously and then BAM, one afternoon one of the vines is all wilted.   Just one vine.   That's a dead giveaway that a vine borer got it.   At the base of the vine where it goes into the root, look for a little hole with sawdusty looking stuff around or below it.   That's where the little bastard went in.

When I find one, I sprinkle again right on the hole and I give the squash extra water.   I've had a bunch of vines that just grew bigger and fatter around the wound and kept on going.   God bless 'em.   I also make a point to sprinkle every plant generously for a while after that because where there's one borer, there are others just waiting for you to get all 'Oh, my squash is so awesome this year, it must be too hot for the borers', so they can prove you wrong.

Then there are the Squash bugs.

Squash bugs will take over if you let them.  If you see cute little eggs on your squash plants pinch them off.  Do not let them hatch.   Do not think they're all cute and that they'll probably be a gorgeous butterfly.   They are not butterfly eggs.  They are spawn of the devil.  I just pinch the leaf where the eggs are and pull the whole section out.   Yes, my squash leaves are holey.

If you see a squash bug, pick it off and kill it. Kill it now.  Personally, I like to shake them up and put them on a brick and step on them.  Look for cute little spidery things in groups with a whitish-blueish body and black legs.  Those are baby squash bugs.   Kill them.   Kill them now.   They're quick so just smack and push them hard with your hand or fold the leaf on them and squeeze.  Get as many as you can as fast as you can.  The baby ones are soft and easy to squish in your hand.

They wash off.  No eew-ing.   This is war.

Four different squashes in this bed. 

As for the soil problem, I amend with a lot of sand.

A lot, I tell you.

And we tucked in several wheel barrow loads of chicken dirt this year, too.   Ideally, in the fall, you burn off all the old debris, thus eliminating as many of the squash bugs as possible, and then you dig in some new manure and let it sit all winter.   Happy soil in the spring!

We never get tons and tons of actual squash.   We get miles of vines and several fruit from each.  I'm OK with that.   I imagine that if I fertilized right, I could cut down on the vine length and get more fruit.   The bees certainly helped increase our yield this year.   I've got some Queensland Blue, Golden Hubbard, an Italian butternut, and Omaha pumpkin, which is a tall elongated jack-o-lantern type of pumpkin.    Pics of all of those as they ripen.

Two Yellow Summer Squash

I planted two yellow summer squashes this year.   Pattypan Golden Marbre Scallop  and Lemon Squash. 

Got all the seeds from Baker Creek - who should totally put me on the payroll because I advertise them so much.

These are hardy plants - both of them.  They do well even in the heat and they're reasonably squash bug resistant. 

The pattypans will get as big as your hand if you let them, but I like them a bit smaller than that.   They have a nice firm flesh and great taste.

The Lemon Squash look like lemons.   They do not taste like lemons.   They're a bit smaller than the pattypan, but the same sort of texture and flavor.

We usually get too many yellow squash to eat right away, so I cut them up and can them with tomatoes.  We call it tomasqua and use it as sauce and soup base.   It's delicious and more interesting than plain tomatoes.  

Here are pics of how they grow on the plant.


Here's the pattypan.

Here's the lemon.

Volunteer Squash #3 and #4

As I've told you before, I left a few volunteer squash in the gardens to see what they would grow up to be.    I had a tiny white pumpkin [which succumbed to the heat and a vine borer, I believe.]  and a bigger white pumpkin.

These are volunteers #3 and #4.

#3 is some sort of warty green pumpkin. 

#4 is some kind of butternut squash. 

Here is what a riper version of #3 looks like [next to the white pumpkin that volunteered.]

The green pumpkin is getting oranger and oranger.   I'm wondering if the green stripes will disappear completely.

I must say that I've had a lot of fun with the volunteer squash and I'm getting things that I probably wouldn't have planted.   I'll definitely be doing this again next year.   I just need to find more room.

Volunteer Squash #2

I was delighted to find that one of my volunteers was a mini white pumpkin.   It set a dozen or so fruit before the heat got to it and did it in.   The last set of 105 degree days fried the poor thing. 

We were able to get about a dozen of them before it died.   I can't wait to use these for fall decorating. 

Volunteer Squash #1

I kept four of the volunteer squash that popped up in the garden early this year.    They all grew out of the chicken coop dirt and since we throw all the kitchen veg scraps in there, I had no idea what kind of squash it might turn out to be.

This is one of them.  

It's a medium sized white pumpkin - a little smaller than the size of your head.

We bought a couple of them for Halloween two years ago and tossed the remnants to the chickens.

So far I have 4 pumpkins ripening and the vine is getting longer, so I might have more.

Updated!: Sweet Creamy Pumpkin Soup

UPDATE:   Pioneer Woman  had a version of sweet creamy pumpkin soup that was even better!    I revised hers a bit and love, love, love the result!   For breakfast!    I like it better because the maple doesn't make this taste like pumpkin pie as much as the other recipe does.   I wish I'd thought of it myself.

Here's the new version:

Sweet Creamy Pumpkin Soup

• 4 cups pumpkin or squash puree
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 tsp salt
• dash nutmeg 
• dash cinnamon [OPTIONAL]

Put all ingredients in saucepan.  Heat through.


Original post:
After I finished cooking up the big pumpkin the other day, I had loads of puree to play with.   I've been busy playing with pumpkin soup recipes.

My husband and I  love pumpkin and squash soups.  The kids....not so much, so I make small batches.   Last week I made two versions of pumpkin soup,  I made a spicy Indian verison and I made a sweet version with cream.   Delish!

K1 likes the spicy version and K2 likes this one [without the candied ginger garnish].   Eric and I like them both.

Enjoy!

Sweet Creamy Pumpkin Soup

• 4 cup pumpkin or squash puree
• 1/2 milk or cream
• 1-2 Tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp salt

Put all ingredients in saucepan.  Heat through.   Garnish with candied ginger and cream.

Pumpkin Soup - Sweet UPDATED

UPDATE:   Pioneer Woman  had a version of sweet creamy pumpkin soup that was even better!    I revised hers a bit and love, love, love the result!   For breakfast!    Here it is:

Sweet Creamy Pumpkin Soup

• 4 cups pumpkin or squash puree
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 tsp salt
• dash nutmeg

Put all ingredients in saucepan.  Heat through.


Original article:
After I finished cooking up the big pumpkin the other day, I had loads of puree to play with.   I've been busy playing with pumpkin soup recipes.

My husband and I  love pumpkin and squash soups.  The kids....not so much, so I make small batches.   Last week I made two versions of pumpkin soup,  I made a spicy Indian verison and I made a sweet version with cream.   Delish!

K1 likes the spicy version and K2 likes this one [without the candied ginger garnish].   Eric and I like them both.

Enjoy!

Sweet Creamy Pumpkin Soup

• 4 cup pumpkin or squash puree
• 1/2 milk or cream
• 1-2 Tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp salt

Put all ingredients in saucepan.  Heat through.   Garnish with candied ginger and cream.

Pumpkin Soup - The Spicy Version

This is a recipe for a pumpkin soup blended with Indian spices that we really like.   Feel free to substitute any kind of yellow winter squash for the pumpkin.  
This recipe will make 4 small servings or 2 large ones.

Spicy Pumpkin Soup

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• 2 T butter, or bacon grease, or sausage drippings
• 2 cups pumpkin or squash puree
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp cumin
• 1/8 tsp nutmeg
• dash cayenne
• salt to taste

In saucepan, caramelize the onion and garlic in the butter/grease/drippings.  Put in blender.  Add pumpkin, chicken stock and spices.   Blend until completely smooth.  Put back in pan and heat through. 

Enjoy!

The Frost is on the Pumpkins...

These are little pumpkins - New England Sugar Pie and Omaha [the egg shaped ones].   I love them.  They make me ready for cool weather.

And the weather is cool.  We've had our first frosts.   It always reminds me of James Whitcomb Riley's poem, 'When The Frost is on the Punkin'.

James Whitcomb Riley is a Hoosier and one of our favorite Indiana sons.   Riley told country stories and celebrated country ways.   He honored the rural in America.  He believed in writing in a conversational style and he used creative spellings to give a better sense of rural pronunciation. [Mark Twain did the same thing.]   Some of the critics disapproved, but the people loved them - and Riley wrote for the people.   Read his poems out loud.   They're amazing.


When the Frost is on the Punkin

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey cock
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence
O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below the clover over-head!
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin' 's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too!
I don't know how to tell it but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me
I'd want to 'commodate 'em all the whole-indurin' flock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!