MelissaH

A link popped up on my Facebook feed to Yotam Ottolenghi's vegetarian Christmas meal, which may hold some possibilities for you. Nothing about it screams specifically Christmas to me (says this nonreligious Jew) but it looks delicious!

I spent three months last spring living in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, so when I saw the bottom picture I remembered a word I'd learned there: "Hair salon" potato chips? Ew! Then I clicked the link, and I still thought...ew!

Today I was back in Syracuse and visited my favorite remaining Asian market. They had a few kabocha squashes, the first I've seen in this area, so I snagged one. Has anyone ever cooked one by microwaving it whole? I was thinking I'd stab it with a knife a couple of times and then nuke away.

Is it too early to start looking for a roommate? The friend who came with me two years ago won't be able to make it this year.

For whatever reason, the electric pressure cookers have their "high" pressure which is lower than a stovetop pressure cooker. I don't know about other books, but the Great Big Pressure Cooker Cook Book by Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein actually gives separate timings for electric and traditional models, to compensate for this. In many cases, the electric time is a few minutes longer than the stovetop time.

Ours was wonderful. We celebrated with our next-door neighbors, as we have for the last few years. So it was the two of us, the two of them, their daughter and her husband and their 20-month-old children, and two friends who otherwise had nowhere else to go. One friend is a vegetarian, but the rest of us are omnivores. Between our collective efforts, we had turkey and gravy, a batch of stuffing with sausage, mashed potatoes, wine, roasted butternut squash, a salad with roasted brussels sprout and shallots, a batch of vegetarian cornbread stuffing, green beans with mustard-maple vinaigrette, brussels sprout/bacon/gruyere gratin, roasted cauliflower seasoned with garam masala, broccoli slaw with poppyseed dressing, and rolls. We nearly forgot to open the cranberry sauce my neighbor made and canned at the beginning of the month. And for dessert, sweet potato pie, apple pie, and pumpkin cake. Nobody went home hungry or empty-handed. Tomorrow, we'll eat leftovers and cook our own turkey; we plan to do the sous-vide breast treatment with the separately-cooked crispy skin from Serious Eats, and braise the legs in wine. The leftover green beans might get turned into a homemade riff on that casserole, with mushrooms and a can of yummy french-friend onions. We got the carcass from yesterday's turkey, so we can make soup, which might be my favorite part of the turkey. I love this time of year.

My town is pretty much white. Once you get into the county, away from the university, it gets whiter. (My husband and I joke that diversity means you have some friends who go to the Irish Catholic church, some who go to the Italian Catholic church, and some who go to the Polish Catholic church.) For anything else, I'm driving an hour to Syracuse (where, alas, my favorite Asian grocer closed over the summer) or an hour and a half to Rochester. Last time I was in Syracuse, I didn't have time to go to the Asian grocer. Last time I was in Rochester, I was on the other side of town from the Asian grocers I like there. I was surprised because in past years, kabocha squash has been readily available at the markets here.

You're on! Get the U.S. border folks to agree, and we have a deal!

I haven't seen them in three different Wegmans stores, my local supermarket or the supermarket in the next town south, the farm market, OR the nearest Trader Joe's. I'm beginning to draw the conclusion that people here must not know what to do with them, so nobody bothers stocking them.

Has anyone else had trouble finding kabocha squash this fall? I see all kinds of other squashes, with butternut (including the cute little single-serving size variant), acorn, and delicata being particularly prominent right now, but I can't find a kabocha to save my life this year!

Would the slow cooker do this trick, instead of the oven?

Rob, how well will this book work for those of us who don't live in or near California? My small town is not blessed with an abundance of greengrocers, fancy meat stores, ethnic markets, or anything else super-special. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have a "peek inside" option for Gjelina.

Comments yes, ratings no. For all the reasons already stated, a rating without some reasons behind it is a meaningless number. That said, those who like to give ratings could certainly include one within their comments.

Kerry, you're making it sound like everyone who occasionally decides to do a little chocolate work should have one sitting around, plugged into an out-of-the-way nook in the kitchen, ready to go at the drop of a hat. Wouldnn't that be fun, and convenient too?

Yesterday, I noticed that one of the butternut squashes in the garage had a bad spot and another looked like it had a small breach in the skin. So I baked the two yesterday, and scooped out the flesh before I rushed off to a hockey game. I now need to figure out what to do with them. Soup would ordinarily be my go-to, but I definitely do NOT need any more squash soup in the freezer. I'm thinking I will eat some with butter and salt and maybe a little maple syrup with lunch today, and freeze the rest, unadulterated, in measured portions that will be easy to use in bread, souffle, or other things that call for squash (or sweet potato or canned pumpkin, for that matter).

I was surprised to see salt being sold in the dishwasher detergent aisle of a grocery store in Paris. My aunt, who lives there, explained to me that the water is notoriously hard, and all the dishwashers there have salt compartments for a built-in water softener. Before they were developed, dishwashers didn't last and didn't work well.

Those of you who have Instant Pots but have also used traditional pressure cookers: have you noticed enough of an advantage to the IP that would convince you to shell out for one, especially if you like your traditional stovetop PC? Have you used your IP for anything that would be difficult or impossible to do with anything else?

I think I've fixed that. Sorry!

Soup report: we didn't take a photo, but the soup looked about like you'd expect a smooth butternut squash soup to look. I did the roasting a couple of days ahead of time, enough veg for a double batch of soup, which pretty much filled my oven. I would have been able to spread things out over all three racks if I'd chosen smaller squashes, but the ones I used were too tall. Yesterday morning, we finished the soup. We dialed back on the spiciness, using only 3 canned chipotles in adobo for the double batch, because we were feeding people with an unknown heat tolerance. We wound up with just enough heat to give a warm tingle at the end, and offered extra chiles for those who wanted more zip. The soup went over very well with the group. With the soup, I chose to make a cornmeal roll, using the recipe from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread cookbook. I started the poolish on Thursday night, and finished the rolls on Friday afternoon. They maybe weren't quite as light as they could have been, but given my time constraints they were quite satisfactory. Had we had the time to make our own vegetable stock instead, we would have prepared a vegan meal for 30. As it turned out, we had to use purchased chicken stock for the soup (no vegetarians yesterday), so we didn't.

Here's an updated YouTube link to the video, now that Google Video is no more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CLCUyPzigE

Another of my favorite winter squash recipes is the pan de calabaza (pumpkin challah) recipe from Maggie Glezer's A Blessing of Bread. If we were looking to do an all–winter squash feast, I'd do this to go along with the butternut squash soup, and then pumpkin muffins with added chocolate chips for dessert. However, that's not really my goal this weekend.

Focaccia might work. But I'm leaning more towards something that can be made as rolls and therefore won't need to be cut, both so that we can just pile them onto a platter without any other special service needs and also for portion control purposes. Have you ever made a sort of herbed focaccia dough but shaped it into individual rolls?

We will have plenty of blue corn chips around. (Blue because I like the way they look against the orange soup.) But I feel like I need a traditional bread, since we'd said we'd be serving soup and bread before we decided on any specifics.

This weekend, we'll be doing soup for 30. We may have both a vegetarian and a dairy-allergic on hand, so we're doing a vegan soup. The one we've decided on is going to be based on this one from Rick Bayless. We'll start by roasting the squash ahead of time, probably tomorrow or Thursday. Any suggestions for a dairy-free bread that would pair well with this? I'd prefer something that is supposed to be dairy-free rather than subbing a non-dairy milk into a recipe written to have dairy.

Our screens seem to be identical to the ones Lisa linked to. I like them because they take all the worry out of pizza making. And the size we have fits in our Breville XL, which is really convenient! (Oh, sorry, that's another thread!)