For Friday night dinner we had lentil soup with Indian spices, which I made a little too salty but was still pretty good. I also improvised a cauliflower dish with dry roasted shallots, store-bought peanut sauce and coconut milk and green beans, and we had boxed couscous.
For Shabbat lunch I decided to try to make a Claudia Roden-style stuffed squash recipe, using the special Lebanese squash my husband bought at the farmer's market. It looked great going into the pot. I hollowed out the whole squash using an apple corer, and stuffed them with a rice and chickpea mixture, flavored with chopped tomato, fresh mint, and cinnamon. I covered the squash with a sweet and sour tomato sauce, also from Claudia Roden's new Book of Middle Eastern Food. I turned the crockpot on low and let it cook from right before candlelighting until lunchtime.
It was terrible. I have a few guesses why. The main one is, the squash doesn't taste like zucchini. It was so bland and unpleasantly chewy. It was probably also a mistake to use the crockpot. We threw away the leftovers.
The rest of the lunch was pretty good. We had French bread from a local bakery instead of challah, and store-bought baked tofu. I made sunomono from a Mollie Katzen recipe (from Still Life with Menu.) You take mung bean thread noodles, soak them in boiling water, and then dress them in soy sauce, sugar, salt, and rice vinegar, and chill them until very cold. Right before serving you add peeled, sliced cucumbers. It's cool to make and refreshing to eat. I like cooking with bean threads in the hot summer. I also made a big salad with purple cabbage, two kinds of lettuce, artichoke hearts, thawed frozen organic haricot verts. We also had a good amount of leftover cauliflower.
All together, not the best cooking I've ever done, but we ate okay. My friend D. said he made a great stufffed squash, inspired by my squash of last week. Maybe he will give me the recipe.
Hey Balabusta,
I made a fabulous Claudia Roden inspired stuffed squash last week because our co-op farm had lots of them. I stuffed mine by sauteeing chopped onion, chopped squash insides (from the hollowing out), and some very nice fresh roma tomatoes together, mixed in some bulgar I moistened with boiled water and a little good olive oil, bulgar, mixed in some allspice and salt and piled it all in the emptied squash shell after I'd brushed it with olive oil. I brushed the pan with a bit of olive oil and baked in a 350 oven for about an hour. I used this mixture to stuff a zucchini, a pattypan and some strange light green Indian squash and it all worked. Everything got all crusty and nice. I topped mine with a some fabulous and kind of unreasonably expensive greek yogurt. It tasted good at room temperature too. This is my stuffed squash suggestion.
Hi.
Posted by: dk | July 21, 2005 at 11:58 PM