Squashes, Sweet Potatoes, Pumpkins

Preparation

1. Bland

   Step 1

   Squash has a luscious affinity for ginger. To taste this yourself, serve squash of almost any sort with 1 heaping tablespoon ginger marmalade per serving. If you don’t have ginger marmalade, orange marmalade is nice instead. But back to ginger. You can also purée your winter squash with some grated fresh or powdered ginger. Add a little brown sugar, too.

   Step 2

   If this doesn’t suit your fancy, try basil, ground cloves, dill seed, dill weed, mace, marjoram, oregano, sage, or thyme. Sweet potato is also marvelous with a spoonful of almond butter stirred in. No almond butter? Peanut butter is almost as good.

2. Difficult to cut

   Step 3

   Winter squash can be rock hard. To make cutting squash easier, place it on the floor of a microwave oven and heat on high for 2 minutes. Let it stand for 2 minutes before cutting.

3. Not enough

   Step 4

   Orange-colored squashes go well with fruits, so combine chunks, or even purées, of them with sautéed apples or pears or sections of mandarin or regular oranges.

   Step 5

   Green and yellow squashes love tomatoes.

4. Stringy

   Step 6

   Beat stringy cooked squash with an electric mixer at high speed for 10 seconds, then at low speed for 60 seconds. Wash the strings off the beater (the floor, the walls, the dog), and repeat if necessary and possible. Or just run it through a food processor.

5. Too much

   Step 7

   Squash keeps better than almost any other vegetable, so don’t worry.

6. Watery

   Step 8

   This a common pumpkin problem. Did you cook the Halloween jack-o’-lantern? That type of pumpkin tends to be very watery (and often bland; see Bland). Leave the cooked pumpkin in a strainer set over a bowl for several hours (or, better yet, overnight in the refrigerator) to allow the excess water to drain off.