Cooking experiment one: Kabocha squash

I’ve been eyeballing this round, green pumpkin-looking thing for the past couple of days now and trying to decide what to do with it. I’d never eaten kabocha squash before, let alone cooked one. I doubted I’d even like it since the only other squash I’ve eaten, butternut squash in the form of ravioli, I didn’t like.

But this came in my Door-to-Door Organics delivery, and I really didn’t want to throw out food, especially since one of the reasons I signed up for Door-to-Door in the first place was the fun of getting something unique that you wouldn’t have picked out at the grocery store. The problem with this is that you get stuck with a mystifying fruit that’s as hard as a basketball.

Gritting my teeth, I plunged into the intertubes for some ideas and came across a post at Tiny Urban Kitchen, and one at Just Hungry. I combined the two—or just minimized Just Hungry’s—and learned all I needed to do was cut the squash, toss it with some spices and bake it.

by miltedflower (Lauren Jong) via flickr creative commons

Cutting was the trickiest part as the outside really is hard. Thump it and you’d think it’s solid inside. I was terrified the knife would slip and I’d cut off my finger. Phalanges in tacked, I tossed the slices with vegetable oil, a little salt, ground black pepper, cumin, and soy sauce. Laid out the irregularly sliced pieces, about ¼ an inch wide, on a baking sheet and stuck it in the oven for 20 minutes at 400-degrees.

Nervous that they were going to taste awful, I made some spaghetti as back-up.

After twenty minutes, the squash was soft and easily mashable with fork. And not too badly tasting either, not sweet like I thought it be, though I went a tad overboard on the pepper and didn’t add nearly enough soy sauce.

After the squash cooled, however, the flavor became too much for me. The squashiness of it all. And I remembered what it was about that butternut squash ravioli that I didn’t like. The taste of the squash itself is pretty intense. Not like spicy food, that explodes in your whole mouth, but squash concentrates on the tongue and saturates it. The texture too, got grainier, like a soft grain, but still grainy.

Loosing interest, I concentrated on the spaghetti, which I had only lightly tossed with olive oil. A few pieces of squash got in there—and it wasn’t so bad. I quickly mashed up a whole slice and mixed it in with the noodles. The flavor wasn’t so intense—the spaghetti evened out the taste and texture and the squash, in turn, gave the spaghetti a subtle flavor, rustic and earthy. Topped off with a little Parmesan cheese, the meal was salvaged. Though maybe not a dish I’d want to prepare again.