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Summer Squash Gratin

By Karena:

Leave it to my husband to want to take fresh summer squash and smother it in cheese and milk.  However, this au gratin recipe actually turned out pretty light and was delicious to boot.  We were inspired by Alice Waters' rendition in her "The Art of Simple Food" Cookbook.  Pile as many herbs in here as you have on hand!

Summer Squash Gratin:

• 6 medium summer squash, we chose a variety of colors
• salt, pepper
• 1 cup cream
• 1/2 cup milk
• Parmesan or Pecorino for grating
• 3 garlic cloves
• a bunch of chopped herbs (we used tarragon, thyme, parsley, chives, and rosemary)

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Wash the squash and cut off both ends.  Using a mandolin, slice the squash and garlic cloves very thin.
3. Arrange a layer of squash and garlic in a medium-sized baking dish.  Sprinkle with some of the herbs and grated cheese and salt and pepper.  Make one or two more layers, each time sprinkling with herbs, cheese and salt and pepper.
4. Pour in the cream and milk.  The liquid should come to the top of the squash (it was a little under the top and worked fine).
5. Sprinkle another layer of herbs, salt, pepper and cheese and bake for 1 hour.  Serve!

Garden Fresh Grilled Pizza

By Liz

There are few things that make me happier than firing up the garden grill for the first spring barbeque of the year. On Saturday the temperature skimmed 60 degrees and friends descended en masse, wine and sausage in hand, to bask in the jacketless dusk.

The tricky part about having a garden bbq in New York in March is there isn’t yet any garden. With a little improvisation and a few carefully arranged houseplants, I recreated the illusion of summer so successfully that I was asked more than once if my pizza toppings were fresh from the garden.

I attribute this in no small part to the dazzlingly fresh flavors of my grilled pizzas (ok, and a little bit to the wine). The thin, crispy dough is grilled quickly, drizzled with olive oil, and then heaped with garden goodness: arugula, cherry tomatoes, basil, shallots, onion slivers, cheese, and topped with a sprinkle of red wine vinegar.

Notice there’s no sauce. You can throw a dash on if you’re partial of course – this is a mix and match kind of operation – but there’s really no need.

The result is cheap and cheerful, and astonishingly good. So good, in fact, that I set a new personal best by eating my pizzas no fewer than three times over a 24-hour period. I’m not necessarily advocating this approach, but I do recommend you try it once. You’ll never look at pizza in the same way again.

Garden Fresh Grilled Pizza

Makes 2 pizzas

One package of Trader Joe’s prepared pizza dough*

1 cup cherry tomatoes, preferably assorted colors

1 small onion, cut in half and slivered

1 shallot, finely chopped

4 cups arugula

Large bunch of basil, roughly chopped

2 cups grated parmesan

2 cups grated mozzarella

Red wine vinegar

Olive oil

Salt, pepper

* Pizza dough is very easy to make, and I often make my own. But since it has to be done ahead of time, I find Trader Joe’s to be a simple, convenient alternative.

Prepare all toppings, and put them in prep bowls by the grill. Soak chopped shallots in a mixture of red wine vinegar and water, to take the bite out.

Preheat the grill to medium high, and brush with olive oil. 

Roll out dough into two 12-inch pies. You will want it to be fairly thin, but don’t exceed the size of your grill. I roll all my pies out at once and then layer them with saran wrap in a large, flat-bottomed fry pan.

Carry pies out to grill, and lay directly on the grill. After about a minute, rotate pies 180 degrees to make sure it’s cooking evenly. Dough will begin to puff in big bubbles, 2-3 minutes.

Slide off the grill and flip, reducing heat to low. Drizzle with olive oil, cover with cheese, herbs and vegetables, and sprinkle with red wine vinegar and salt and pepper.

Close the grill top to let the toppings warm, 1-2 minutes. Serve immediately.

Baked Acorn Squash with Fruit and Gruyere

By Liz

I’m blown away by my coworkers. They’re eloquent, intelligent and passionate, and none more so than my boss, a published poet with a gift for precise phrasing. As the new kid in town, I’m determined to prove my communications chops.

For my first assignment, I was asked to remake the Press, a clunky company newsletter that could be a case study against layout in Word. I love blogging, so I figured I’d pretty the Press up by taking it digital… what could possibly go wrong?

After over 100 painstaking hours of designing Press 2.0, I held my breath and emailed the link to all 190 staff. I just forgot one thing: 160 of them work from school district offices… that block outside blogs. As I copied my pretty Press down from the Web and back into Word, defeated, I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony.

So at the end of the day, I wanted nothing more than a glass of wine and Dinner 1.0, something comforting, casual, and impossible to mess up. A while back, Sauced reader Heather (herself a talented poet and editor of the Blood Orange Review) had emailed me a recipe for baked acorn squash, her comfort food of choice as a poor, tired grad student in the Pacific Northwest.

She described the dish as a foodie’s mac and cheese, and it fit that description to a T. Each warm spoonful was a buttery bite of contentment, a perfect end to an imperfect day.

Baked Acorn Squash with Fruit and Gruyere Stuffing
From Heather Hummel  

2 Acorn Squash
1/2 tsp salt, divided
1/8 tsp pepper
2 leeks, trimmed and sliced
2 TBS butter
1 pear, cored and chopped
1 apple, cored and chopped
1 1/3 cups cubed french bread (or darker bread for a richer taste)
4 oz. Gruyere cheese, shredded
2 TBS minced chives
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Heat oven to 400. Halve and bake the squash until tender. Sprinkle squash with half of the salt and pepper. While squash is baking, cook leeks in butter, in a skillet for 12-15 minutes (medium temp) until tender and browned. Increase temp to medium-high; add fruit and cook about five minutes until fruit is tender too. Stir in remaining ingredients, including remaining salt and pepper. Stuff into squash and bake for 10-15 minutes or until heated through.

Comments from the Squash Gallery

By Liz

The primary goal of starting this blog was to swap food ideas and inspire ourselves to venture into uncharted culinary waters. While Karena and I were perfectly happy mucking around in the kitchen ourselves and didn’t know if anyone else would come along for the ride, today we received two lovely and appreciated additions to the post on squash. 

Heather, a fellow Bay Area foodie, introduced the "glories of delicata squash, a little-known and unassuming wonder of the world.” It’s an heirloom squash that’s apparently been overlooked for the last century or so for its thin skin. I’ll keep an eye out for it next fall at farmer’s markets.

Susan would like to correct the record on my growing up in a squash-adverse home. In her defense, she would like to offer the following testimony: “Elizabeth’s very first solid food in life was.... zucchini, which I believe falls into the squash category. Unpeeled, steamed, then put through a baby food mill. She loved it. May it please the court, I offer as evidence this photo from the summer of 1982.”

Evidence accepted. In fact, it just so happens that not only was it my first food, but its also one of my quick, staple dinners.

When I say uncharted culinary waters, I don’t mean only elaborate weekend meals, though those are fun. I also desperately need a new set of fallback meals, the kind that you can come home after a long day and whip together in under 30 minutes, the kind that doesn’t make your dinner partner groan “again???”

Today was not only a long day, it was also my first employed day in three months, and my first in three years that actually required me to think. As Nora put it, “You feel like your brain is being dusted off. Only better, because that would hurt.”

So when I got home, the last thing I wanted to do was think about making something new. I defaulted to a Shravan standby, a delicious, simple dish that tastes far better when he makes it (I still don’t know why). Here’s my attempt at writing down the recipe (I’m sure I’ll receive revisions soon).

Shravan’s Curried Courgettes
1 onion, chopped

1 T. olive oil

2 zucchini (courgettes for the colonial types), thinly sliced
1 can (tin) tomato sauce
2 t. cumin seeds
1/2 t. tumeric
salt, pepper
fresh cilantro (coriander), chopped
yogurt (yoghurt)
steamed rice

Make 1.5 cups of steamed rice for two people (2 cups if you want leftovers).

Heat olive oil over medium heat in a nonstick pan and cook onion until carmelized (approximately 10 minutes). Then cook it some more (you’d be amazed at how long Indians cook onions). Add a touch of water immediately if onion starts to burn.

Ad spices and tomato sauce and cook 5 more minutes. Add zucchini, and cook until soft. Serve over rice, topped with yogurt and coriander.

Enjoy with a glass of house red and unwind after a day of work!