Saturday, December 10, 2011

Adventures in the Kitchen

I've mentioned that the five English-language radio stations we get here in the Eastern Province include the Armed Forces Radio Network. Instead of commercials, they run short spots lasting 1 to 3 minutes that are pulled from public networks all over the U.S. One of these is a short radio blog done by Mike Colameco called "Food in a Flash". Because cooking is one of my hobbies, I usually try to pay pretty close attention to his bits. This weekend, he talked about baking winter squash with maple syrup, bacon fat, and lime juice. Bacon? Limes? Squash? It sounded pretty interesting!

I like all of those flavors on their own so the idea of combining them sounded like something I definitely needed to try. When I ran to the commissary on Friday, I picked up some imported limes and two nice Saudi-grown butternut squashes. We can get locally grown limes but they are small and bitter and not all that juicy. I prefer to pay more and use limes that have a more familiar performance.

Unfortunately, I was folding laundry at the time of Colameco's bit and didn't get all the details, such as oven temp, and whether you peel the squash or not. To find an answer to these questions, I turned to the venerable Joy of Cooking. But even this hoary reference didn't help me much. I could have sworn Colameco said to peel the squash, but JofC said not to. Recipes for baked squash in JofC called for oven temps ranging from 325F to 400F--that wasn't narrowing things down much. But in the end, I realized that all of the JofC recipes involved steaming the squash in the oven then adding some seasoning. That clearly wasn't what Colameco had in mind when he was extolling the virtues of squash baked in bacon fat.

So like any good cook, I improvised.

I did follow JofC's tip to peel and dice the raw squash on a folded towel using a serrated blade. Those tough winter squash can be kind of tricky to cut up when raw. But it all came off smooth as buttah.

I put the coarsely diced squash in my trusty pyrex baking pan, drizzled some maple syrup over it, then I followed that with some more maple syrup (maple syrup, yum!). I gave the squash a liberal dousing of freshly ground pepper. Next I laced seven fat slices of smoked bacon around the squash cubes (yeah, seven slices for one squash; don't be so quick to judge--it's a damned miracle that I even have bacon and thus not surprising that I am liberal in its application). Finally, I squeezed 2/3s of a fresh lime over everything.

It took about 55 minutes at 375F for the squash to cook tender. I covered the dish with foil for the last 20 minutes.

The end result was fabulous! Since I didn't add any extra oil, the dish wasn't sloppy or greasy. And the pepper and lime really brightened up the dish, making it feel Caribbean or Asian in influence. Easy to prepare, easy to cook, and as long as you overlook the saturated animal fats, ever so healthy for you!

Let's review the ingredients:
  • maple syrup: organic, comes from a tree, has to be better for you than processed white sugar, and it is so smooth and delicious
  • freshly ground black pepper: if you can flavor chocolate with black pepper, well, you can put this stuff on just about anything (maybe not oatmeal, but even that might be worth an experiment: black pepper and maple syrup oatmeal...yum!)
  • freshly squeezed lime juice: a secret ingredient of many tasty South Asian sauces
  • smoked bacon: the mellow fatty counterpoint to the acidic lime and the sharp pepper and the sweet syrup, bacon can also be used to flavor anything; I knew this bacon was very salty so I added no additional salt to the squash
  • butternut squash: fiber, vitamin A, seasonal, locally grown, side or main dish as you choose--how could you not appreciate the versatile butternut?

2 comments:

payingattention said...

Bacon . . .?! ; )

lilspotteddog said...

smuggled in from Bahrain. there is a pork store in Manama at the end of the causeway.