let's go crazy
squash possibilities and more cake (mis)adventures
I’ve moved from climate anxiety into full-on climate despair as we brace for more rainstorms after last week’s flooding. Not to mention watching people listen to the message “we’re putting a limit on gas fillups to make sure there’s enough for emergency vehicles until we can restock, just in case” and hear “better get some gas right now, even if you don’t need it, because who knows when you’ll be able to get more!” Seeing people lining up at the stations and wondering if that was the only reason they left their house was depressing, to say the least.
You never know if emotional turmoil will have you trying to distract yourself with making a perfect replica of a restaurant meal you ate one time in 2007, or if you’ll be on the couch pulling chips out of the bag without even bothering to sit up. I suppose I should be thankful I threw myself into cooking this past week, because it felt better to have something to focus my restless, helpless energy on. Unlike last week, when I would take food out of the fridge in a daze at dinnertime, and attempt to cobble it into an edible meal somehow.
Over the weekend we were finally able to get out to celebrate Jeff’s sister graduating university, something that happened at the end of the summer. She chose dinner at Chickpea— I’ve eaten from the food truck but haven’t been to the restaurant. We ordered 5 mains and shared them between the 6 of us. They have the Hafla option for sharing similar to Le Feast at Nuba, but this was a slightly more economical way to get to try a variety of things. My favourites were the chickebab, the kasum, and the chickpea fries (obviously).
This weekend I have a visit from a dear friend to look forward to— he lives in Ontario and we have not seen each other in person since October of 2019. He also has the dubious honour of being the first visitor in our recently repurposed guest room! Once again I must thank the MVP of this year, the covid vaccine, for making such things possible. I think we’ll be having a homemade pizza night with some other friends, which I’m excited to share the results of next week. In the meantime I hope all my American friends are recovering from yesterday’s feasts (though I will never understand why you eat it at 3pm), and I send strength and vengeance to anyone working in retail, shipping, or customer service this weekend.
Over the course of the fall we seem to have just slowly amassed one of every possible type of winter squash, and they’ve just been sitting around the living room and entryway and kitchen counter (they’re DECORATIVE, okay?) while I try to come up with ways to use them. This week I finally roasted a lovely buttercup squash, thinking I’d use some of it in panzanella with some croutons made out of the stale sourdough halves I seem to keep finding myself with. If you haven’t used one before, buttercup squash is a larger, dark green winter squash with a lighter green section on top that makes it look like it’s wearing a little hat. The texture is somewhat like acorn squash, but it has a deep orange colour more like pumpkin or butternut.
I roasted a beet along with it to add some variety to the panzanella, and made a basic vinaigrette with aged balsamic. We’d found some pretty good looking radicchio on the dollar rack at the produce store, so this plus some kale made up the leafy section of the salad, and crumbled goat feta, toasted almonds, and pickled onion finished everything off. The beets made it look like a bloody mess, but it was lightly sweet from the squash, bitter from the radicchio, and tangy from the dressing and pickled onion. I will continue to sing the praises of panzanella as the only salad that actually fills you up… and few things make for a more satisfying crunch than a sourdough crouton.
Jeff and I got our flu shots last weekend at the pharmacy in the Save-On, and since you have to stick around the store for 15 minutes to make sure you don’t have a reaction, I went to the deli to browse the cheese section (the best part of Save-On). They’ve started to carry more nice plant-based cheeses like Blue Heron, and I was surprised and delighted to discover that Applewood now makes a vegan smoked cheddar. I’ve used their intensely smoky dairy cheddar in mac & cheese before, so I thought I would do the same with the vegan version and see how it compared.
There was also lots of the roasted buttercup squash leftover, and I mashed some up and added it in, since squash purée does a great job of making a sauce creamy. With my usual vegan mac method as a starting point, I used a bit less cheese than I normally would since I was adding the squash (about ⅔ of a 200g block). Mac & cheese is happy to accept whatever vegetables you’ve got that need to be used, so I threw in the remainder of the bunch of kale and a couple of sliced mushrooms.
I tasted a piece of the cheese before adding it to the sauce, and although the texture of it on its own is definitely “vegan processed cheese”, the smokiness is amazing, and it melts really well. This was a deliciously comforting meal— the smoky cheeze paired well with the creamy coconut milk and squash in the sauce, and I liked that the squash gave it a nostalgic orangey colour (the cheddar is white). I got some inquiries about it on Instagram, so I’ve included my loose recipe below. We can pretend it’s because of Yanksgiving this week, if you want.
Last Christmas I was gifted a beautiful Nordicware Heritage bundt pan, made one perfect cake in it, and since then every other one has stuck to the pan and come apart. So clearly it has been cursed by dark magic and I’ll have to consult the oracle on how to break the spell. In the meantime I managed to salvage this chocolate stout cake, a Smitten Kitchen favourite, by covering the intact bottom half of the cake in ganache and sprinkling the crumbs of the broken top half over it, pretending it was meant to be like that all along.
I should have gotten the message that something was amiss when I opened the beer for this cake, the one remaining bottle of Jeff’s homemade honey porter. As soon as I popped the top it foamed up with the force of a pyroclastic beer volcano all over the counter, my sleeves, the kitchen cabinets, the oven door, the floor. I managed to shut the top again and take it outside to think about what it had done, but I still had to wipe beer off the fruit that was in the bowl. The beer was fine, just old, so I measured out what I needed for the cake and dumped the rest (what little there was after the explosion). It makes for a beautifully moist, dark cake with a fine crumb, and a little sour cream or plain yogurt keeps it from feeling overly sweet despite the amount of sugar in the batter.
The ganache is just semi-sweet chocolate melted with a little milk or cream and instant coffee for flavour, and I love the light bitterness of it with the intensity of the cake. Fleur de sel sprinkled on top is the perfect finishing touch, because chocolate is always better when it’s a little salty. And if I hadn’t just told you about it, would you really be able to look at this cake and know its traumatic history?
Finally this week we thawed some Indigenous-caught salmon that my aunt gave us early in the fall and made it into a really good rice bowl, inspired by both okonomiyaki and the B.C. roll, the latter of which is credited to Vancouver-based sushi chef Hidekazu Tojo. Mostly I was just excited to put a bunch of crunchy things on top of some rice and eat them with teriyaki mayo, which I made using the 2-minute mayo method and mixing in some store-bought teriyaki sauce I found on the fridge door (where it came from or how long it’s been there is one of life’s unsolved mysteries). It didn’t seem quite right when I tasted it, and Jeff said wasabi might help, but since we don’t have any I did the next best thing: a spoonful of dijon mustard, which turned out to be just what it needed. This was really the best thing I could have made with the first batch of rice from our new rice cooker— we were making do with the instant pot, but the rice texture is nowhere near as good.
VEGAN SMOKY SQUASH MAC & CHEESE
300g (12 oz) small dried pasta (shells, elbows, orecchiette, etc)
1 small onion, diced
3 to 4 garlic cloves, minced
roughly 2 cups of sliced or chopped veg of your choice*
1 tsp curry powder
½ tsp each oregano or marjoram, dried sage, fenugreek, and paprika
3 to 4 tablespoons dry white wine (or use broth)
3 to 4 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 tbsp dijon or yellow mustard
splashes of hot sauce
400mL can coconut milk
½ cup squash purée
120g (5oz) vegan smoked cheeze (like Applewood or Spread’Em), grated
salt and pepper
½ cup breadcrumbs
*note: I recommend mushrooms and one or two other things, like broccoli, bell pepper, or kale. If you’re using leafy greens you’ll want closer to 3 cups.
Preheat the oven to 400°F, and bring a pot of well-salted water to a boil for the pasta. Cook the pasta to about 1 minute before the point when it’s perfectly done, and drain. I like to save some pasta water to re-hydrate the leftovers when I reheat them.
Meanwhile, warm a glug of olive oil over medium heat in a 12” ovenproof skillet (if you don’t have one, you can transfer your mac to a baking dish later). Fry the onion for a 3-4 minutes with a big pinch of salt, until it’s slightly softened and browned. Add the garlic and the mushrooms (if using), and any sturdier vegetables. Cook until the vegetables are browned and softened but not completely cooked through, and the mushrooms have released their water, about 5 minutes. Add the spices and toss to toast.
Deglaze the pan with the wine, then add the nutritional yeast, mustard, and hot sauce, and let bubble for a minute or so. Add the coconut milk and the squash and bring to a simmer, until the squash looks incorporated into the sauce. At this point, stir in any leafy greens and let them wilt. If your pan isn’t oven-safe or it’s too small, transfer to baking dish now. Add the pasta and about ⅔ of the cheese to the sauce; mix until the cheese melts. Taste for salt, and season with pepper and additional salt if needed.
Top with the remaining cheese, then the breadcrumbs and a dusting of paprika (you can used smoked for even more smoky flavour). Bake for 15 minutes, then broil for 2-3 minutes to toast the breadcrumbs and brown the edges. Let sit for 5 minutes before serving so you don’t burn your tongue, like I always do.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, and this week, I urge you to donate to any of the verified fundraisers here for BC flood victims, with focus on those that have not yet met their goal. And here is another meme of truth for you.