This isn't so much a recipe as a work-in-progress. I still have to try it a few more times and administer some tweakage. But I think it has definite possibilities once I've got the bugs ironed out.
When I was in my local food co-op last week I saw the cutest baby pumpkins. So I bought one that was about six inches in diameter. It's taken me until today to have time to play with it, but one of the great things about winter squash is that they store for seemingly ever.
The past day or so, the weather has been cool enough to contemplate turning on the oven, so I hauled my little pumpkin out of the fridge and considered what I would do to it. Just the night before, I had made ma po tofu, and that spicy Chinese flavor profile was on my mind. I was also thinking of this fabulous baked whole kabocha squash stuffed with meat and spices I had had a few months ago at my favorite Szechuan restaurant. I felt more like having a meatless dish today, and without a stuffing, but decided to do something with the seasoning flavors anyway.
I washed the little pumpkin and chopped it in quarters. I removed the seeds and stringy innards, but decided not to peel it; peeling winter quash can be a real pain. I then made a little sauce/rub consisting of:
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1 tsp dark soy sauce
- 1 Tbs hoisin sauce
- 1 tsp five-spice powder
- 1 tsp powdered white pepper
- 1 tsp chile-bean sauce
This was quite thick, so I added a couple tablespoons of water, just enough to loosen it up, and then spooned this stuff into the hollows of each piece of pumpkin, spreading it around until all cut surfaces were covered. Then I put the pumpkin pieces into a pyrex baking dish and slid it, uncovered, into a pre-heated 350 deg F oven.
I let it go for a good hour and a half. When I pulled it, it was tender enough to easily slide a knife tip into it. The sauce had gotten extremely dark--not sure every person would find that attractive, but I though it had possibilities. Tasting it, I found the flesh could have stood another half hour of cooking, or maybe to have been cooked covered so that it was more tender and juicy. Either that, or I should have put more fat in the sauce--but I'd rather not do that, so perhaps a covered steam-bake is the way to go. I liked the seasonings pretty well, but it could have penetrated the flesh a bit better. Searching on the web, I saw one recipe for baked stuffed winter squash that instructed you to score the interior surfaces so that the stuffing flavors could permeate. I think I'll try that scoring technique next time.
Winter squashes provide a terrific assortment of nutrients, and when not gunked up with mass quantities of sugar or syrup or--horrors!--baby marshmallows the way so many cooks do, can be really delicious. Yeah, they're starchy, but hey, you're supposed to be eating starches in a balanced diet--as long as they're nutritious starches, which winter squashes are. They're even "diet friendly" -- while my food plan counts a mere 1/3 cup of rice as a single starch serving, it figures a single serving of winter squash at a full cup. That comes in particularly handy when I'm going through one of those inevitable phases when I'm having trouble feeling satiated and need a little more volume in my intake.
So yeah, I'll definitely try this experiment again, to see if I can get a perfected recipe out of this idea. And maybe I'll also have a go at that Szechuan stuffed pumpkin too. That dish was a real winner--and with the right choice of stuffings I think I can make it a super-healthy dish too.
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