Although I profess that summer is my favorite season, I secretly love winter. In Northern California, where I live, winter is the season of relentless, romantical rain; it’s thus also the season of more napping, less exercising, constant cashmere scarves, cozy down sleeping bags, gratuitous novels, hot toddies, and gloomy days spent in the sanctuary of the library. And it’s my favorite season for food.
I know it’s technically not winter yet, but the general malaise of Halloween makes winter seem right around the corner. So tonight, I made squasharoni. Mainly because I liked the sound of the word “squasharoni.”
This is one of those recipes loosely interpreted from a veggie cookbook from an East Coast hippie retreat center, so there are a lot of obscure condiments involved. If you don’t happen to have one of them, or two or three, I think you could safely improvise without doing any major culinary damage.
Winter Squasharoni
- First, cook a bunch of pasta. Like, a whole box of it. Even though this is a “roni” recipe, I cheated and used some tubular pasta that struck my fancy at The Hole.
- While that’s happening, laboriously chop up a winter squash. Butternut is nice. I dig kabocha. The thing about kabocha is, you can actually eat the skin, but for this pasta, I took it off anyway. Peeling and dicing a kabocha squash is a sublime form of zen torture. If I wasn’t such a picky freak about freshness, I would probably just buy pre-cubed butternut squash like a normal person.
- In a cast-iron skillet, saute red onion in EVOO for a few minutes.
- Add the squash, a half cup of water, some salt, and maybe a handful of garden herbs (oregano, sage, thyme).
- Reduce heat, cover, let simmer until the squash is tender.
- Meanwhile, mix together: 1/3 cup tahini, 1 T miso paste, 1 T vinegar (preferably umeboshi), 1 t tamari.
- Once the squash mixture is ready, add this sauce to it, along with a handful of chopped walnuts and a dollop of really pricey chevre cheese that you splurged on because your life seems hollow and meaningless and cheese always makes that better.
- Drain the pasta and mix it into the rest.
- Sprinkle on top: panko bread crumbs (I have no idea what these are, but they are always enthusiastically and somewhat snobbishly recommended to me by my grocerial advisor, who I trust implicitly) and shredded parmesan.
- Cook (right in that same cast iron skillet) in the oven at 375 for 20 minutes.
Oh and incidentally, this is another reason I love winter:
It’s a pretty lovely little pad for holing up in.
Cheese *does* mitigate the hollowness and meaninglessness of life to a high degree.