A couple weeks ago, Dave gave me a couple of acorn squash that his mother had found mysteriously growing in her garden. I supplemented them with a few organic, locally grown squash from the supermarket. I found a pretty simple recipe for making squash into a sauce of sorts, and modified it pretty heavily to get the end product.
I peeled (skinned?) the squash (I used five 2 lb squash), chopped them into 1" pieces or so, and roasted them much as one would potatoes, with olive oil, salt and pepper. Parchment paper on the bottom of the pans is amazing and I wish someone had told me about it sooner. I also roasted some garlic in the usual way (3 heads, we likes the garlic). Garlic goes into a pan with a bit of (optional) butter, and half a bottle of white wine, Barefoot Chardonnay in this case. Heated it to a simmer, let it do that for a while, then added about half of the squash, since there was no room in the pan for more. Stir that, let it integrate and come back to heat, started the pasta (3 lbs) cooking. Once the pasta was done, reserved about 2 cups of the cooking water, drained, and put the squash-garlic mixture into the pasta pot with the rest of the squash, put it back on the heat, then added pasta water until the texture was nice and smooth. Added about half a cup to a cup of shredded parmesan cheese, stirred and heated until I couldn't see the parmesan anymore, tweaked it with more pasta water. I added a dollop of sour cream, half and half or milk would work nicely too, though you could just as easily skip it and the parmesan if you wanted it vegan. Then add the pasta, I used rotini so the squash would get into the ridges, and mix thoroughly.
While this was going on, I fried some sage leaves, which in the future, I will do ahead of time, since they really need to be watched. I used a mixture of olive oil and butter, the latter being the traditional, the former making it easier not to end up with a lot of burnt stuff.
Serve the pasta with toasted walnuts, more shredded parmesan, and crumble some of the fried sage leaves on top. I served it with some mixed greens with a balsamic dressing, which was a really nice pairing, to the point of potentially using balsamic vinegar on the pasta next time.
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2 comments:
Butter is never really optional. :)
I tried it with pumpkin instead of squash. While the pumpkin was roasting, I cooked some pancetta and some mushrooms (in the pig fat, with sage), and put those on the side while I made the sauce. I left the cream out of the sauce, but left some cheese in. I did use a little pasta water to thin the sauce out, because it was rather thick, and I put the pancetta/shrooms in after I stirred the cheese/water in. I let it thicken slightly, and then added the pasta.
I also didn't have sage leaves (stupid Stop and Shop was out; too lazy to go to another store) so I used the good-quality McCormick, which ended up being less dried sage and more chopped-sage-in-a-bottle. I just added a bunch while I melted butter, before I added the wine, and it seemed to be okay. I could have used more; it got overpowered by the pumpkin pretty easily.
Next time, I'm leaving the pancetta crumbled on top, because it got soggy when it got mixed into the sauce.
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