It's Squash Season - Grab a Grapefruit Spoon! {One Great Tool}

Today I'm introducing a new series, One Great Tool. In each post, I'll highlight one hand tool that is indispensable to our daily cooking and gardening activities. We hope that by sharing our favorites with you, we can encourage more efficient and fun homesteading.

The first step to cooking any winter squash or making a jack-o-lantern is to remove the seeds and stringy flesh from the inside. Pulling them out by hand is one way, but it always reminds me of the 'cold bowl of spaghetti masquerading as pig guts' trick. It feels icky and rarely removes all of the seed material.

Instead, we go right for a grapefruit spoon. The row of metal teeth is meant to perfectly separate sour grapefruit segments from thin, bitter membrane. More frequently in our house, the teeth scrape the insides of harvest orange winter squash.

With a few simple scrapes using the spoon, all the gooey bits of the squash separate from the flesh which can then be roasted whole, roasted in chunks for soup or boiled. We save the seeds for roasting or replanting.

We reach our hands, clutching a grapefruit spoon, into the middle of jack-o-lantern pumpkins too. The spoons cleanly remove the bits of membrane that might otherwise catch on fire when you light the candle. I've even used it to remove the seedy middle from halved zucchini and summer squash.

We don't eat grapefruit very often because it isn't grown in Ohio and some people experience a negative interaction with a medicine Alex takes. But we do use our grapefruit spoons for squash frequently, especially in the fall.

Score Squash Now For Fun Autumn Scarred Squash

Last year I saw Jamie Oliver post an amazing Halloween display with scarred squash. I booked marked the idea in my mind and am now scoring all our volunteer squash plants. All you need is a sharp knife blade or skewer and a young winter squash. Without removing the pumpkin, butternut, or other variety squash from the plant, score a design lightly into the skin of the squash.

Then, let the plant grow. It will weep a little liquid in the first twenty four hours and then begin to form a brownish scar. As the squash continues to ripen and change color, the scar will balloon slightly but stay brown.

This intervention could potentially weaken or draw disease to the fruit but thus far our scarred squash are growing just the same as the non-scarred fruit on the same plants.

The possibilities for these decorations are endless. We've drawn shapes, jack-o-lantern faces, initials, and messages that we'll show off later in the season. And the best part is that the scarred squash will still be edible!

Are you already thinking about autumn? If you're looking for a few gardening ideas, try signing up for my Fall Gardening class where we'll talk about autumn crops, cover cropping, and season extension.

Whole Roasted Squash {Technique}

Sometimes my life is forever changed by the simplest updates in cooking technique. Such a moment happened a few weeks ago when we went to a friend's cabin.

Lacey had a pie pumpkin and roasted it so simply. She yanked off the top, popped it in the oven, and cooked. No pounding with a cleaver, no smashing on the sidewalk (look at Lil so little in that video!), no scraping out the insides. Because the squash steams itself from the inside, it takes just as long as halving and roasting, approximately 45 minutes per small squash.

The flesh never ends up burnt as it occasionally does when I roast halves too long without enough water. The finished squash, which is done when the skin yields to the pressure of your finger, is not only easier to open and scoop, but the seeds are pre-steamed. When I roasted the seeds in the oven, the resultant seeds are crispy outside but tender inside, perfect for snacking.

This is the best technique. I can't believe I've been roasting squash for so long in any other way. Do what I say, not what I do - cook your squashes whole from now on!

Open a Hard Winter Squash Without a Knife!

How do you open an acorn squash? Or a huge Cinderella pumpkin? I usually pull our big cleaver from the magnetic knife strip. I hold it with both hands and smack at the tough skin. The squash rolls and I try to right it. The cleaver gets stuck and I smash down further anyways.

Alex sees me, fears for his beautiful countertops and my fingers, and takes over the job.

Recently, my friend Susan let on that there is a better way....a method so simple a five year old can do it with no knife!

In our preparations for Christmas Eve pumpkin soup, I decided to try it. I handed Lil a large white pumpkin grown by a friend, whispered the instructions, and turned on the video camera.

What do you think? Will you try the throw and crash method to open a winter squash soon?

Added to Hearth and Soul Volume 29.

Head High on the Fourth of July!

We visited the other garden last Tuesday.  Look what we found: Corn!!

Corn that hides Lil the corn princess!

Ears of corn with tassels!

Corn with whispy leaves taller than me!

Baby squash lacing through the corn and...

...heart shaped sweet potato leaves winding their way through the squash!

Our community garden plot is growing according to plan; mostly it takes care of itself.  Here's hoping the rest of the summer proceeds with fairly normal weather so that we might harvest great gobs of corn, squash, and potatoes to put up for the winter.

I love America, a place where there's still room to sow seeds of change, where one can nurture gardens and hopes.  Happy Independence Day!

What's Left in the Larder

Today we ate our last winter squash harvested over six months ago.  It was bitter and I'm sad about that.

I wondered exactly what is left in our larder.  Here's the count as of March 9, 2010:

8.5 quarts applesauce

10 half pints tomato paste

3 quarts tomato sauce

12 quarts whole tomatoes

2 half pints ketchup

3 quarts barbeque sauce

3 pints honey strawberry jam

1 pint peach jam

2 bags frozen blueberries (maybe a pound each?)

8 2-cup portions of frozen pumpkin puree

handful of dried tomatoes

As we deplete our larder, we are relying on purchasing produce more than ever.  I try to find fresh vegetables at farmer's markets and Clintonville Cooperative, our local natural foods store.  Their selection of produce is getting slim and I can't wait to see more green house grown produce available soon!

How are your preserves holding up?

Squash: the wonder plant

One of the most satisfying plants to grow, in my opinion, is squash.  Zucchini, summer, acorn, butternut, pumpkin, and the like are all tremendously easy, delicious, and big. Sometimes size does matter.

Squash seeds send out large leaves just a few days after direct seeding.  The leaves grow big and wide quickly.  Kids love squash plants because they literally grow overnight.

Wide leaves shade out weeds and reduce the need for watering.  They also hide the squash fruits, making harvesting something of an adventure.

In gardening, especially urban gardening, size does matter.  Squash takes up a lot of space, but yields plenty in return.  A friend of Lil's planted pumpkin seeds with his preschool class.  He took the seedling home and recently measured the plant.  It is 51 inches in length!  Several squash varieties including zucchini can be effectively trellised to reduce some of the horizontal space needs.

Squash happens to be one of my favorite fall vegetable flavors.  Zucchini is remarkably versatile fresh and can be shredded and frozen to enjoy throughout the winter.  Winter squash (acorn, butternut, pumpkin) can be roasted, pureed, sauteed, or grilled.  All varieties contain lots of fiber and vitamins.  Winter squash can be stored whole in a cool dry place for months at a time.

Before you cook your non-hybridized* squash, consider saving some seeds.  Just remove the flesh from a dozen or so seeds and set in a warm dry place until thoroughly dry.  We lay ours on top of the refridgerator on a cookie cooling rack.  Store in a labeled envelope and you can plant again next year. *Some hybrid plants will not grow from collected seeds.  Organic seeds and seedlings are, by their organic certification, non-hybrid. It's too late to plant squash and expect a fall harvest in Ohio, but warmer zones still have a chance to enjoy this wonder plant this season.  The rest of us will wait until the spring.

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Can someone help me remember to plant pumpkin seeds at the appropriate time to grow our own jack-o-lanterns?  That would be fun.

What's Growing: July 10, 2009

What's growing?  Everything!  Well, almost everything. Peppers are starting to mature and we are eating them as we need.  If we keep them on the vine, they will ripen to red, which is fine by me.

We have tons of green tomatos on the vine.  A very few have started blushing red.  One cherry tomato plant (a volunteer) has given us our first two ripe tomatos!

Speaking of volunteers, the sunflowers are a delight!  I might actually plant them on purpose next year.  The big blooms provide the perfect playground for us to observe goldfinches, cardinals, and bees.

Every day or so I pick a handful of green beans.  Beans are one of my very favorite veggies and I can't help but eat a lot of them raw.  We are leaving the rest of the dragon tongue on the vine to dry out for dry beans.  I've never done this before and hope it works out!

Only one broccoli plant has a broccoli head.

And one has this:

Not a broccoli. Maybe cauliflower?  Except we started these all from a single seed packet and I didn't intend to plant any cauliflower.  Hmmm...

We have eaten a few servings of kale from the forest that is happy along the fence.  Swiss chard is almost ready for picking too.

Blueberries didn't like the cool weather and dropped most of their berries.  We were able to eat a few ripe ones, but only maybe 10 in all.  Boo.

Then there's the squash.  We started with just four mounds and they have now taken over a huge chunk of the garden.  The golden nugget variety has lots of fruit, some of which is almost ripe, I think.  (Never grown it so I'm not sure.)

We were calling the hokkaido blue variety a bust until today when I saw these squashlings.

I thought I could illustrate the size of the squash monster by placing our little squash princess in the picture.

We tapped the rain barrel as we watered this evening.  I am hoping for a storm tomorrow to soak the plants and refill our barrel.

What's growing in your garden?