If you are the kind of person who sees vegetables as the obligatory and dismal path to, say, cheesecake, winter squash may change your perspective. It’s not too far-fetched to think that these meatily sweet vegetables – with tantalizing names like butternut, delicata and sweet dumpling – were born of some child-led campaign to dupe parents into serving dessert first.
Where many vegetables are a condiment (think tomatoes, cucumbers, basil), winter squashes are a meal unto themselves. They need little dressing up (bake and apply butter), yet they can be transformed into stars of every culinary genre. Beyond pies, there’s soup, lasagna, pancakes, muffins, custard, roasted squash pieces and fries.
Winter squashes are in the plant family Cucurbitaceae, along with melons, pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers and zucchini. It’s no wonder that this hard-shell crop, originating in Mexico as a puny, bitter-fleshed gourd, underwent a 5000-year domestication, breeding into existence the thick, sweet flesh of today. Squash, an inextricable component of the Native American agricultural trio of corn, beans and squash, predates even its two other sisters by several thousand years.
It always amuses me that although Thanksgiving was the original holiday of local foods, a literal giving of thanks for a bountiful harvest season, most of America – despite geographical region – follows the same menu plan.
The first Thanksgiving, held at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, was a three-day harvest festival celebrating the bounty of the season and (let’s hope) the generous native wisdom which allowed the settlers to coax food from this uncharted ground. And of course, in 1621, local food wasn’t about biking down to the farmers market with a groovy cloth bag on your shoulder and Barbara Kingsolver on your mind – it was about surviving.
If eating local appeals to you on Thanksgiving or any other day, a winter squash (or 20) can be purchased at any local farm or at the Durango Thanksgiving Farmers Market, to be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 19 at the La Plata County Fairgrounds. (Also available: local potatoes for your garlic mashers, carrots and beets for roasting or salad, or some local meat to dip in your Hermosa applesauce, plus garlic for everything). Stored in a cool, dry spot (closet, mud room, insulated garage), winter squashes will last well past Thanksgiving, at which time all the cans of pureed pumpkin sprouting on supermarket shelves will appear slightly odd and industrialized.
Creamy and sweet, winter squash can stand in for the proverbial Thanksgiving sweet potato dish (marshmallows optional, but butter recommended). And pumpkins, being just one of many winter squash varieties, can be replaced with any cousin for a pumpkin-esque pie. After extensive testing, New York Times food writer Melissa Clark proclaims the best substitutes for canned pumpkin in pies to be butternut squash, acorn and kabocha, in that order.
I’d like to add, although it feels fairly absurd to point this out, that actual whole pumpkins stand in beautifully for canned-in pumpkin pies. You can make your own pie puree by roasting or steaming any winter squash, scooping out the softened flesh and adding eggs, condensed milk, sweetener and spices.
This time of year, farms are a beauty pageant of winter squashes: blue, orange, yellow, specked, warty, lumpy or smooth and shaped like an acorn, torpedo, banana or turban. Some are a dainty, one-person serving (sweet dumpling), and some are so gnarly and dense, a hand-saw is required for entry (hubbard).
Winter squashes are power houses of nutrition, containing megadoses of vitamin A, vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber and manganese. They’re also a good source of folate, omega-3 fatty acids, iron, antioxidants and beta carotene. But as the children know, we love them because they taste divine.
Rachel Turiel is a Durango Herald columnist, managing editor of Edible Southwest Colorado magazine. She blogs about growing food and a family at 6512 feet at http://6512andgrowing.com.