mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

"Eat lots a fish!" - tilapia, for one

Fish, as is well known, can be a great food for those into dining for health and weight management. But these days, fresh fish is beset with so many problems: possible contamination with mercury and other pollutants; over-fishing of wild stocks; fish-farming methods that damage the environment; and often astronomical prices at market. So what's a a health-conscious fish-fan to do?

Eat tilapia, that's what.

Tilapia can be farmed sustainably and with minimal impact on the environment--they are omnivores but thrive on an all-vegetarian environment, and are traditionally farmed in enclosed tanks (as opposed to the environment-damaging open tanks used to farm Atlantic salmon). They are by no means endangered--in fact, in some areas where they've been introduced to the wild, they've become an invasive nuisance species, another reason why the preferred farming method is all-enclosed tanks. They're a low-fat low-on-the-food-chain species--so, alas, not much omega-3 fatty acid benefit, but on the other hand that means they don't accumulate fat-soluble pollutants the way salmon and other fatty fish do. Their mild white flesh makes them a great culinary canvas for all sorts of seasoning and cooking techniques. And best of all, they're a real bargain price-wise.

Here is a Chinese-style whole steamed fish with black bean sauce with which I've had great success. One big tilapia, cooked this way, makes a great meal for two. I like to leave head and tail intact as the Chinese do--but if you can't bear looking at the fish head on your plate, by all means have the fishmonger remove it.

Ingredients:

• One whole fresh tilapia, about 1-1/2 to 2 pounds--scales, gills, innards, and fins removed, head and tail intact
• Ginger root, about the equivalent of a 1-inch cube
• Scallions, one or two
• Chinese fermented black beans (not to be confused with Latin American black turtle beans!), about 2 tsp. or to taste
• Chinese dark soy sauce, 1 tblsp.
• Shaohsing wine (or other rice wine, or dry sherry), 1 tblsp.
• Dark sesame oil, 1 tsp.
• Sugar, 1/2 tsp. (don't freak! it's only 1/2 tsp., and it really does help balance the sauce)
• Salt, about 1 tsp.

Special equipment:

• A large wok or pot with a tight-fitting lid to use as your steamer--I use a deep wok-like pan with a glass lid, which is really handy for keeping an eye on the fish without removing the lid and letting all the steam escape.
• A heat-proof rimmed dish which will just hold the fish without letting any of its delicious juices drip away, and which will fit comfortably inside your steaming utensil with the lid in place--I use a big pie plate.
• A rack to hold the plate on which you will lay your fish--I use one of those folding steamer baskets with the central post removed.

Method:

1. Mise en place: roughly chop the black beans. Peel the ginger and cut into fine julliene. Trim the scallions and julliene them too.
2. Set up your steaming equipment: put just enough water in the bottom of your pot or wok so that it stays below the surface of your steaming rack. Put the rack in, put the lid on top, and put the whole rig over moderate heat so that it'll have a good head of steam rolling by the time you're ready to place the fish inside.
3. Prepare your fish: rinse it all over, removing any remaining bits of gore from its abdominal cavity, and pat dry inside and out with paper toweling. Cut deep crosswise slits in both sides of the fish, about an inch apart and just about down to bone without going through. Rub inside and out with the salt, working it into the slits as well. Place the fish in your rimmed plate.
4. Combine the black beans, soy sauce, wine, oil, and sugar, and stir well. Pour the black bean mixture evenly over the entire fish, then scatter the ginger and scallions evenly over the fish as well.
5. Slip your dish full of fish into your steamer equipment, getting the lid back on as quickly as possible to avoid letting too much steam and heat escape. Let the fish steam about 15 to 20 minutes uninterrupted (this is where that glass lid comes in really handy!).
6. After about 15 minutes or so, you can start checking for doneness by slipping the lid off and looking inside one of the slits you cut in the fish. If all the flesh down in that slit has just barely lost that translucent still-raw look, your fish is basically done. Do not over-cook!
7. Bring the fish to the table on the plate in which it was steamed, and serve with rice to sop up all the pan juices. For more adventurous eaters, the meat and gelatinous stuff in the fish head is great eating--the Chinese consider the fish head a delicacy, to be reserved for the dinner guest of honor.

Variations: You can of course do this recipe with just about any fish of about the same size and mildness of flavor. With a little adjustment in timing and such, you could do it with steaks or fillets too (in that case, I'd recommend using some non-stick cooking spray on the dish that will hold the fish). For those who like their food spicy, you can add crushed dried chilies or chili bean paste (toban jian) to the black bean mixture.

Oh yeah--I am told that there is an old superstition among the Chinese (and other sea-faring peoples too) that if you turn a fish over at the dinner table, somewhere out at sea a fishing vessel will capsize! I'm not superstitious but I do like honoring cultural traditions, so once I've served all the meat off one side of a whole fish I pry up its spine and remove it to get at the remaining meat, rather than attempting to flip the fish (this also keeps the delicate fish from breaking into bits, so it's practical as well).

More about tilapia:
Oceans Alive on eco-safety of tilapia
Tilapia: the fish of the future?

Today's lunch: pan-Asian hodgepodge soup!

Once or twice a week at least, I have this lunch routine in which I simmer a random assortment of interesting mostly-Asian ingredients together in broth for a kind of pan-Asian fusion soup. From reading various blogs and on-line forums frequented by cooks from various Asian countries, I get the impression that many of them keep it a lot simpler than I do, and might find my soup a bit of a random hodge-podge--but hey, I (usually!) like what I come up with, and I'm a bit of a hodgepodge cook anyway so I guess it suits me. Although I do note that the beloved Japanese winter stew known as oden is also a bit of a hodgepodge--so I'm going to go ahead and claim that as one of my inspirations.

Anyway, today's hodgepodge contains:

• Leftover chicken broth from my freezer;
• Konnyaku noodle knots
• Shiitake mushrooms, broken into pieces
• Black ear fungus, broken into pieces
• Daikon, sliced and quartered
• Kombu, snipped into slices
• Fresh ginger root, three little slices
• Garlic, a couple of big cloves sliced

Simmer that all together for about an hour and voila--yummy filling soup! And incidentally, very low in calories yet full of nutrition, flavor, and interesting texture contrasts. And very warming on a relatively cool day here in slightly-overcast coastal Southern California. Soup is good food!

Weekly weigh-in: inch by inch; plus--variety meats, the spice of life?

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 204.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 130.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.73 lb

Okay, so I won't pretend that I'm not pleased about hitting the 130-pound cumulative weight loss milestone. It's a nice round number, and that's pretty damn cool.

Even better, though: my bedroom closet in my new abode has mirrored sliding doors, so I essentially have a floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall mirror greeting me every morning. In the past this might have been a real bummer. But now--even though my bod does have various saggy-baggy things going on (I'll spare you the details--aren't you glad?--but weight loss, surgery, and just plain age will do that to one) ... I say, even despite all that, I'm actually pretty darned pleased with seeing my reflection these days. I can look in the mirror unclothed and say to myself, "Y'know, if that's how things remain, I could happily live with that."

The key thing for me is that my bod, though still hefty, no longer looks like it's encumbered by fat. At my top weight, even I had to surface from denial long enough to admit that all that excess flesh made it look like I should be nearly immobilized. And in many ways, I was. Now, even though my crapped-out knee and other whiney joints still interfere, I feel pretty liberated in my physical movement--and not only is that a sweet feeling, but the point of the exercise after all.

Meanwhile, on the "Cooking for E." front, I have been pleased to discover another surprising food favorite of his: sauteed liver and onions. When I think of all the people I've known, even some diehard foodies, who detest liver, I am all the more gleeful over the fact that my picky eater E. actually likes the stuff. Myself, I adore "variety meats" of all sorts, so I am thrilled to have someone with whom to share that enjoyment. So I fixed liver and onions for E. and myself last night, and E. just loved it.

I happen to think that the reason most people think they hate liver is that they've never had it properly cooked. It is ridiculously easy to over-cook it--only a few moments of inattention turn it into dried-out nasty shoe leather, which is what most people complain of when they say they dislike it. For those of you who want to overcome your liver aversion, here are my secrets: use moderate heat, get the pan fully warmed up, and then let the slices of liver stay in the pan barely a minute on either side--so short a time that it's still reddish inside and you'll think it's undercooked. Trust me--it isn't. Especially if it's thin-sliced like most stores have it, the carry-over heat will continue to cook the insides once you remove it from the pan; and even though it'll still be a little pink on the inside when you cut into it, that's totally okay and safe. In fact, that's how it should be served! Trying to get rid of that pink is what turns it into the shoeleather that everyone, including I, hate. You have to deprogram yourself from that myth that pinkish middle == unsafe undercooked meat, and once you do you'll discover some fine--and inexpensive!--eating.

Another secret: especially if you're working with beef liver, a preliminary soak in milk will help draw out some of the stronger flavors. As little as 20-30 minutes will help, though I've seen some cookbooks say as long as a couple of hours. Discard the milk afterwards. Here's my basic recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 lb liver, thinly sliced
• 1 large onion (a sweet onion like a Vidalia is especially nice)
• milk -- about 1/2 to 1 cup
• flour for dredging the liver -- maybe about 1/2 cup or even less
• seasonings to taste (salt, pepper, paprika, etc.)
• Your cooking fat of choice (oil, butter, non-stick cooking spray, etc.)

Equipment

• Heavy-bottomed skillet, preferably big enough to hold all the liver in one layer with a little room to spare
• Non-reactive bowl (glass, stainless steel, etc.)
• Shallow dish for holding the dredging flour--a pie plate works great
• Paper toweling for drying the liver.

Method

1. Give the liver a little rinse in cool tap water. Put it in the non-reactive bowl, add milk just to cover, and set in the fridge to soak a bit while you deal with the onion.
2. Peel and halve, or even quarter, the onion, and slice thinly.
3. Put the skillet over moderate heat, add a little of your cooking fat of choice, and sweat the onions with a little bit of salt at least until they are very soft and translucent. If you have the time and inclination, let them keep going until they are golden-brown and caramelized to your liking. When done, remove them from the pan and reserve. If it's going to be a little while longer before you cook the liver, put the onions somewhere where they'll stay warm (like a very low oven).
4. Put the flour in the pie plate, and season to taste.
5. When you're getting close to serving time, take the liver from the marinade and layer it between some paper toweling to dry it off a little.
6. Put some additional cooking fat in the big skillet and put it over moderate heat. Have the liver and the flour just nearby the stove.
7. When the skillet is fully warmed up, dredge each slice of liver lightly in the seasoned flour, gently shake off any excess, and lay it down in the pan. Work quickly so that you get all the liver in the pan more or less at the same time.
8. By the time you get the last piece of liver in the pan, the first will probably already be ready for turning--I'm serious! It happens that fast! Turn each piece to cook the other side and then watch it like a hawk--it'll be done before you know it. If you'd like you can cut a slit with a sharp knife to take a look inside--the outer edges should be brown, but while the middle should have lost the raw look it should still be quite pink. Whip that stuff out of the pan right now!
9. Serve the liver with the onions next to and/or slightly draped over it. A nice green salad and a baked potato make great accompaniments.

Variations: my mom never bothered with the flour dredging, and her liver turned out great too. You can also use liver from other critters--veal and chicken livers are also great. Chicken livers, because they usually come whole and have got a bumpier surface area, will require a little more active sauteeing action--but still, don't let them lose that pink in their centers. And you can augment the onions with other vegetables--sliced mushrooms and bell peppers are especially simpatico.

A word of caution: Since one of the liver's bodily function is to filter out impurities in the bloodstream, liver from the mainstream livestock industry may well contain unhappy amounts of environmental contaminants. Since I don't eat it very often, I don't worry about these issues too much; however, if I've inspired you to go on a variety-meat odyssey, you might want to buy your liver and other offal-ly bits from natural food stores, that carry meats from animals protected from pollution and drugs and raised on natural organic foods.

A few quick simple veggie thrills

Okay, some of the following is so super-simple as to barely qualify for the category "Recipes", but hey, they work for me!

I picked up some super-cheap asparagus yesterday at a local Mexican market. I ate a few of the skinniest tenderest ones just as is, and put the rest on the Foreman grill, well lubricated with cooking spray. I actually let them cook a little longer than is the fashion nowadays, so that they were pretty soft--but I like 'em that way. Obviously if I've eaten some of the stalks raw, I have nothing against crunchy vegetables as such. But I also have a soft spot in my heart for vegetables cocked until they start getting tender, even a little creamy. With asparagus, that doesn't really take very long, so you have to watch so they don't shoot right past to overdone even by soft-cooked veg fan standards.

Recently I've been really getting into raw radishes, both the Western small round red ones and the big honkin' Japanese daikon. The latter really work great as a dip vehicle--just slice one crosswise into thin discs or "chips". The former are fun to snack on whole--it's admittedly harder to dip them, but still doable if you're determined!

I've made a really spicy pungent dipping sauce for these and other veggies out of a couple of cubes of red chile-seasoned fermented bean curd, along with a little bit of the oil/brine from the fu yu bottle. Major umami enrichment for all of that roughage.

Spicy beansprout salad

I've gone on a Korean food kick recently. It's been a little hazardous to the stomach lining, but oh it hurts so good. All the banchan, the side dishes, especially fascinate me. All these new-to-me and inventive ways to cook vegetables. I've tasted a couple of different versions of kong namool, a banchan made from bean sprouts, and wanted to give them a go at home. They came out pretty darned good for a first try--flavor excellent; texture, well, I need to blanch and shock them a little more quickly next time. Maybe just pour boiling water on them rather than plunge them into boiling water.

Anyway, here's what I did, and even though I haven't perfected it yet, I still think it's worth sharing. It's a light refreshing salad with lots of flavor interest, the slightly wilted beansprouts have great texture, and it's a great treatment of a cheap, nutritious, and low-calorie vegetable.

Ingredients:

• bean sprouts, mung or soy, a huge baleful of 'em, rinsed and drained -- they shrink in volume when cooked, however briefly
• vinegar, 2 Tbsp -- I used Japanese unseasoned rice vinegar
• dark sesame oil, 2 Tbsp
• soy sauce, 1 Tbsp -- I used Chinese light soy sauce
• sugar, 1 Tbsp -- I used plain white granulated for convenience
• garlic, two big fat cloves, slivered
• dried red chilies, two, crumbled--or quantity to your taste; I used chilies de arbol
• scallions, two, slivered

Method:

1. Bring a huge potful of water to a boil. Dump in all the beansprouts and blanch until they have just barely started to wilt, no more than one minute. Drain immediately and shock with cold water to halt cooking. Drain well and place in a non-reactive bowl.
2. Mix together all the other ingredients except the scallions. Pour this dressing over the bean sprouts and mix well. Let cool if needed, and then chill covered in the fridge overnight.
3. Traditionally, a small serving of this and several other banchan would be served alongside any Korean meal.

Eat More Veggies recipe: hippie vegan roasted borscht-stew

The weather's been nippy around here for the past week or so--okay, it's nippy only by Southern California standards, but there were actually frost advisories the other night for some areas, and that's nippy enough for me. Anyway--that, and a call for a Christmas Day potluck item, turned my thoughts to borscht.

I've read that in some places in Eastern Europe, borscht is simply the word for soup. There are other places where borscht has to have beets in it, still others where beets are optional. Seems like every region and ethnic group has its own variant. As usual, some nice person at Wikipedia has explained a bunch of this.

In my 20s I became enamored of hippie-style borscht with lots and lots of stuff in it, such as the recipe in the original Moosewood Cookbook (which stained and battered book I still own; that version is apparently out of print). The following recipe starts with the Moosewood recipe but then takes off in a whole other direction. Roasting the beets, onion, and garlic gives my version added umami/caramelization umph, and skimping on the liquid results in something much more like a hot cooked salad/stew than a soup.

This recipe makes a huge vatful of the stuff, but that's okay; this is definitely the kind of dish that's even better the next day.

Ingredients:

• 8 fresh beets, whole, 2.5 inches in diameter or less; if they came with greens intact, remove, leaving an inch worth of stems (be sure to save the greens for some other dish)
• 1 large red onion, peeled, trimmed, and cut into large chunks
• 1 head garlic--pull as much skin off it as possible while still leaving the head intact
• 1 medium head of cabbage, cored, quartered, sliced into thin shreds
• 4 medium red potatoes, quartered, cut into thin slices (do not peel; keep slices submerged in cold water until ready to use)
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 1 large can whole peeled tomatoes, deseeded and drained--reserve juice
• 5 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in a cup of hot water for 1/2 hour, then sliced thinly--reserve soaking liquid
• 1 tbsp fresh dillweed, minced
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• 2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
• olive oil as needed
• salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg F.
2. Give onions, beets, and garlic a light coating of olive oil. Place on lightly greased rimmed baking sheet, keeping beets separate from onions and garlic, and roast in oven. Remove onion and garlic after about 30 minute or when the onion is well-browned and the garlic very soft.  Keep roasting the beets until their skins rub off relatively easily. Rub those skins off while they're still warm, quarter the beets, and slice thinly.
3. Squeeze all the garlic out of its remaining skins and keep with the onion.
4. In a very large soup pot over medium-low heat, sweat the carrots and celery in a little olive oil with some salt, until the veggies soften up and release some liquid. Add the shiitakes and the roasted onion and garlic; saute for a few minutes. Add the mushroom soaking liquid, stock, wine vinegar, potatoes, beets, tomatoes, dill, caraway, and a generous grind of pepper. Stir well to blend, cover, and let it gently come up to a simmer.
5. Gently fold in all the cabbage, cover, and let cook until the cabbage has just gotten soft, still retaining a little crunch. Add reserved tomato juice as needed to not-quite-cover the vegetables. Cover and bring back to a simmer again, It's done when the potato slices are just cooked through.

Serve hot, warm, or cold. You can garnish it with a little sour cream or plain yogurt, or just with more fresh minced dill. Great with thick slices of chewy crusy dark bread, the more artisanal the better. Happy holidays!

Recipe: roasted apples

This is ridiculously simple, but so damn good. Roasting removes some of the apples' liquid content, intensifying their flavor and sweetness, making their interiors soft and almost creamy and their cut surfaces almost like apple-caramel-flavored fruit leather. Who needs a baked apple all tarted up with brown sugar and butter?

Ingredients:

• Large, sweet baking apples -- Romes work excellently
• A full-bodied, on-the-sweet-side soy sauce -- like Chinese dark soy sauce, or one of the other styles of seasoned soy sauces
• Non-stick cooking spray or neutral-flavored oil
• Low-fat yogurt for garnish (optional), and/or ...
• Apple juice, brandy, etc. to deglaze pann (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Cut apples in half, leaving skins on. With a melon baller or small sharp-edged spoon, scoop out the seeds from each half, leaving a small indentation.
3. Use a baking dish (preferably metal) big enough to hold all the apple halves in one layer with a goodly amount of room between them; spray the interior liberally with non-stick cooking spray (or grease lightly with oil if you're using that instead).
4. Place the apples cut side up in the baking dish. Dribble a scant half-teaspoon of the soy sauce into the indentations where the seeds used to be.
5. Place on a middle shelf in the oven. Roast for about an hour, or until the apples are soft and their cut surfaces well caramelized (check on them regularly so they don't overcook).
6. Use a spatula to gently lift each apple-half out of the baking dish onto individual serving plates. You may optionally place a small dollop of low-fat yogurt in each apple-half's indentation. Serve piping hot.
7. You may optionally use a small amount of apple juice, brandy, or other flavor-compatible liquid to deglaze all the reduced caramel-like juices off of the bottom of the baking pan. Use the deglazed juices as-is to drizzle over the apples; or add some additional spices or flavoring as desired or inspired to do; or maybe add a little bit of cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce.

Roasted fennel is one satisfying vegetable

One of the reasons I love ethnic groceries: great fresh produce at great prices. On Sunday I picked up two bulbs of Florence fennel for a buck at North Park Produce. Today I did my favorite super-simple thing to do with them: trim up the bulbs, slice, salt and pepper them, give 'em a spritz of cooking spray, and roast in a medium oven until the exteriors brown and the inner flesh gets meltingly tender.

I think the tenderest of this stuff would be excellent on bruschetta. I wouldn't know for sure, because I wind up wolfing it down as soon as it's cool enough to eat. Leftovers, if any, are also good cold.

Similar to the celery it faintly resembles, the outermost stalks and the narrow stems are usually too tough and fibrous for pleasant eating cooked this way, though their anise-y sweetness can be fun in a vegetable stock. Some trim the cores out of the bulbs too, but personally I happen to think that's the best part.

What I'm eating and/or drinking this evening: the minimalist smoothie

I'm feeling kind of tired and achey this evening, so I went for really simple foods needing little preparation. I thawed out an IQF boneless/skinless chicken thigh, threw it on the Foreman Grill, and had it between two slices of sprouted-grain bread. It was a pretty humongous chickie thigh, so that made a decent sandwich.

And right now I'm sipping on what may be the world's simplest smoothie. I had some cubed almost-too-ripe papaya in the fridge, so I chucked about two cups of that in the blender along with a cup of apple juice. No ice cubes, no yogurt (frozen or otherwise), no fancy-schmancy add-ins, and absolutely no additional sweeteners of any sort needed. The papaya and apple juice were plenty sweet on their own, the papaya provided ample body to the mix, and as the ingredients were chilled, so was the product.

I never understood why people felt the need to muck up a perfectly good smoothie with all that other stuff anyway. Especially the frozen yogurt--yeah, it's yummy, but if you're thinking it's "diet" food just because it's lowfat, think again folks--yogurt doesn't come that sweet on its own. And while I like an ice-filled smoothie on a super-hot day, in the cool of the evening it just makes my teeth hurt. And all the "power" add-ins--the powdered proteins, the greens, the potions, and on and on--well, okay, if you're looking for a full meal in a glass, I guess that's groovy. But c'mon--fruit is plenty nutritious on its own without all that gussying-up. I'm sucking down four full servings of fruit in my minimalist smoothie here, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I've noticed that Jamba Juice, a chain that has built its business on elaborate smoothies chock-full of healthy add-ins of this sort, has recently added a whole new category to their menus: fruit-only smoothies. Obviously there must have been demand from a whole bunch of customers who, like me, feel that there are times when less is indeed more.

Today's cooking experiment: baked spicy pumpkin

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.