The squash deluge has begun

[deborahjross]

We have an extravagance of winter squashes this year. Here's a new one for us, an heirloom variety called Tennessee Sweet Potato squash.



We have 8 of them, weighing about 15 lbs each. The shells are so hard, davetrow needed a meat cleaver to chop it into quarters. I wrestled with one of them and then microwaved the chunks -- a delicate taste like the yellow sweet potatoes; doesn't need seasoning or sweetening to taste very nice indeed. The other quarters I roasted and then scooped into containers to freeze or use in soup or even just mashed.

Coming up: Cinderella pumpkins, butternut, buttercup, carnival, kabocha, sugar pumpkin. and a very strange volunteer that looks like a tromboncini that curled itself into a circle. We had some delicata but ate them first as the skins are fragile and they don't keep well.

Comments

[noire.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I'm Not A Cook, not even a little bit. But I love love love winter squash and hate cutting them up. So the thing I've learned is that you can microwave them (whole) for about 6-8 minutes or so. It doesn't really cook the squash, but it softens up the shell so you don't need to use an axe on the thing!

Delicata are my super favorites (partly because the skins are so easy to cut!) but we seem to be having a shortage of them this year! I ordered special from my farm share and got extras, but they're missing from the stores. Even Whole Foods doesn't have them, and if they do manage it's only a few. *sob*

I didn't know you had them so much on the West Coast. J didn't know about them until he came east...

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

The Tennessee Sweet Potato Squash are way too big to put in the microwave. As are the Blue Hubbards and the Cinderella pumpkin. I wonder how they're handled commercially. I joked about a chain saw, but they're not only covered in machine oil but will chew up the squash something awful. Maybe a saber saw? But we Shall Prevail with our mighty cleaver.

We've grown delicata for quite a few years now. They're small enough so we can train the vines vertically (on the vineyard cordons where we thinned out the grapevines) and the squashes hang like Christmas ornaments. The strategy is to alternate legumes (usually Emerite pole beans or French golden filets), tomatoes, and some other crop. Insect pests return the next year to the same place, so you gotta fool 'em, and the legumes replenish the soil.

I regularly find delicata at our local health food store, but only for a short season because of storage challenges.

[tcastleb.livejournal.com]

Oh, yummy. I love sweet potatoes, and that squash sounds nifty.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

I think you have to get the seeds from an heirloom catalog (we got ours from a neighbor -- this area is a hotbed of seed and seedling swapping) but it's worth it if you have the room for an aggressively territorial squash. And an axe to chop it up with.

[tcastleb.livejournal.com]

Alas, I don't think squash would do well on an apartment balcony with little to no sunlight. Would be fun someday though.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

Definitely not. They would take over the entire block!