Acorn Squash with Frosted Cranberries

Ok. I know it’s been a while. There are reasons for my near-month of silence, though. Christine and I got to skip out on our cooking quite a few times this month, due to a few parties and our parents’ 26th anniversary. Our whole family got sick, recovered, and is now well…oh, and my sister Morgan and I went off to Washington, DC for a weekend. Not that the trip had anything to do with cooking nights, but it did make for a busy month.

Anyway, this week, we had this squash dinner on Wednesday, October 28; we got to change things up a little on Thursday, because it was my dad’s 50th birthday. I know – congratulations to him! My mom made him Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourgignon, which I thought was very apropos. Christine created a beautiful salad, and I mashed the potatoes. It was a joint effort, and the meal was delicious. Positively amazing.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is going to tell you all about Susie Fishbein’s recipe for acorn squash. Are you a squash fan? I never really was. Then my mom told me that pumpkins are squash. I nearly fell over. You mean PUMPKIN PIE is made out of squash!?!? NO! You must be mistaken. And of course, she wasn’t. That sort of opened my eyes to the wonders of food and the different flavors you can get by adding different ingredients. Butternut squash, we’ve learned, makes great soup. Pumpkins make good pies (and just about nothing else, so it’s good we found something to do with them). Zucchini and summer squash are versatile, and you can do a lot with them in their season. Then there’s acorn squash. They’re big and green, with an occasional blotch of orange. Very interesting. They are also exceptionally hard. You really have to work to get the knife through them.

Susie Fishbein’s recipe for Acorn Squash with Frosted Cranberries, which can be found in her Kosher By Design cookbook, is absolutely *the best* recipe for acorn squash. It just can’t be beat. The squashes are baked for a while, face down, absorbing water and softening until tender. Then we put a little dollop of a brown sugar & honey mixture, which melts into the hollow left by the seeds you remove. Finally, you put a handful of frosted cranberries (those are cranberries that have been boiled for a little while in a simple syrup and then tossed with sugar) into the hollow and serve. Ahhhh. So good. The flavors meld into autumnal perfection. We make this recipe all the time. It’s that amazing.

On the side, we decided to serve risotto. We used one of the Barefoot Contessa’s recipes, but we removed the chunks of butternut squash she had in hers, since we were already serving squash. Risotto, if I haven’t mentioned it before, is a real labor of love. Regular rice can be stuffed in a pot with some water and boil itself away for an hour or so. Risotto, on the other hand, take constant attention and work. The liquid is added a little at a time, so you can never walk off and leave it. But the creamy consistency and incredible flavor really do make up for this. We made saffron risotto, which promptly turned bright yellow. Christine’s comment was, “That’s not a color found in nature. But then again, it is.” Meaning that it looks like Heinz Mustard – very fake – but since the color comes from the stamens of crocuses, it’s actually real. There’s perception for you.

It was about…4:50 (and we were thinking dinner at 5:30) when Christine said something about muffins. “We shoudl make some kind of muffin to go on the side,” she proclaimed. I looked at the clock doubtfully. “Ok…what kind?” I was dubious. Her answer was our mom’s classic Maple Morning Muffins (I think it originally came from Aunt Thelma – not sure about that). I asked if she could mix it up in 10 minutes, and then it could bake until 5:30. We were optimistic about the timing, so we started whisking cheerfully. I did the wet ingredients, she did the dry – we’re a perfect team. We had them ready to go, but our squash was still hogging the oven, which was also at the wrong temperature because of that. The muffins had to sit forlornly on the counter, waiting for their turn in the oven. Dinner had to be pushed to 6:00. But we didn’t feel like failures – dinner is whenever we say it is, anyway.

Then it happened. We pulled them out of the oven, golden brown and beautiful. We let them cool for a minute or so, and then started to put them in our basket. Uh-oh. The combination of gluten-free flour and heat caused them to turn into muffin crumbles and dust. Heartbreaking. We ended up with a napkin full of ice cream topping, if you know what I mean, and no muffins for dinner. THAT’S when we felt like failures.

But that feeling passed quickly, as we tasted the squash and risotto. Wow. They were perfect in every way. And so was the dinner, even without the infamous muffins.

On a scale from 1 to 10: 10.

It doesn’t get better than this, folks. Especially for a cool night in October. You need this recipe (http://www.amazon.com/Kosher-Design-Picture-Perfect-Holidays/dp/1578197074/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256928029&sr=8-1).