Baked Squash ...I'm talkin' winter squashes, not zucchini.

 

Oven-baked squash is a fall classic. I like most squash varietals but prefer buttercup and butternut to acorn, the flesh of which I find a bit coarse and watery when baked. My favouite might be a big lumpy Hubbard squash.

Bake any sized squash at 375 degrees F. until a knife slides easily into the flesh. The larger the squash the longer you will need to bake it. You don't need to place it in a baking dish but doing so is prudent, and certainly makes it easier to slide in and out of the oven.When the squash has cooled, remove the skin and seeds. Then use the cooked veg in any way you like. I like mine mashed with butter, salt and pepper and some brown sugar. 

For your interest, I have included below Tabatha Southey's essay on those dreaded late summer squashes.....

Squash it: Don't start in with me about the bounty of the harvest season, by T. Southey

It was around this time of year, in my home town when I was growing up, that our neighbours would begin arriving bearing baskets brimming with zucchinis, harvested from their gardens. And it was around this time of year, when I was growing up, that I began to hate our neighbours and wonder what it'd be like to live elsewhere, somewhere with less green space, where you didn't know most of your neighbours anyway.

It's true what they say about small towns: We answered the door to strangers. But not to people that we knew. At least not in September, when my mother used to say, pulling the curtains closed, “Pretend we're not home.”

Acquaintances would come by our house, empty-handed. Just to chat. Sure.

“Looking forward to going back to school?” they'd say.

As if. And as if they'd come by just to ask me that riveting question. And then, just as they were leaving, they'd run out to their cars and return with a shoebox full of zucchini, “Oh, I almost forgot, picked fresh this morning … ”

“We have … ,” my mother would start to say, but they'd be gone.

Sometimes people gave zucchini to innocent kids as they dropped them off from, say, ballet lessons. “Not a problem,” they'd say. “I'll drive.”

“It's our turn,” other, weaker, parents would protest, but those aggressive-gardening-car-pooling-monster-parents would happily dump a daughter on the curb outside her house with her little pink shoes in one hand and half of hell's harvest in the other and take off down the street, tires screeching, whooping for joy.

Some people feigned medical emergencies so their children would dial that special number by the phone. Over that good neighbour would rush and then, wham! Zucchinied!

Sometimes, after checking that no one was lurking around the back door of course, my mother would hand a plastic Zehrs bag to me. “Nip over on your bike and leave that for Mrs. Gorden,” she'd say.

And I'd do it – as if I didn't know what was in that bag. Even though Mrs. Gordon was so tiny and frail that I'm pretty sure she survived for 12 months entirely on the two boxes of Brownie cookies that I guilted her into buying from me every year. And yet I knew better then to argue with my mother.

One did not argue with one's mother. Not in September – unless one wanted to feel a hard, fresh zucchini across the back of one's hand.

Instead, I'd just step over the inevitable bushel of zucchini left, with ninja-like skill, outside our screen door and do what I was told – which was to give a woman I believed to be 250 years old a cash-crop-sized amount of vegetablematter and then peel out of there before she caught me.

My mother, meanwhile, would set to work retaliating for that bushel of zucchini by baking up a nice, fat whole-wheat zucchini loaf for Mrs. McLachlin, who'd apparently left the bushel basket there, and “whose mother had passed away.”

“Eighteen years ago,” my father reminded her.      

“Still, she's our neighbour. In fact, I'll double the recipe,” my mother said, shredding away.

“Gill's mother's not looking too robust these days!” she added, brightening.

Zucchini is prolific. One zucchini plant can meet the zucchini needs of an entire block – accepting the fallacy that humans even have zucchini needs. Still, gardeners feel compelled to plant an entire row and then to share the inevitable bounty with everyone they can corner.

Gardening-wise, zucchini's relatively easy, yet it looks impressive. People like to show their zucchini off – it's the Smoke on the Water of vegetables.

Rhubarb is the Louie Louie.

The Zucchini Wars continued until October. The loaf would draw zucchini-muffin fire. We'd respond with zucchini pie. They'd deploy fritters. “Kids will eat anything if you put it in Jello!” people shouted as they hurled zucchini tied to other zucchini through someone's living-room window.

Who started that rumour, I wondered. Had there been actual research? It gave me nightmares. Even if it's true, I thought, surely this behaviour shouldn't be encouraged?

Once Canadian Living mainstreamed ratatouille, it was best to avoid dinner invitations. You'd sit through a meal while they played a little cat-and-mouse with you: The appetizer? No? The soup? A zucchini casserole? Or the cruellest deception ever practised on a child – the zucchini chocolate cake?

Why, once I remember driving back from just such a dinner. We were all wondering how we'd escaped it, when my father, who'd been smacking his lips uncomfortably from the driver's seat, sighed. “Those bastards,” he said – “the wine.”

He shook his head sadly. “The wine.”