Squash season is back with Steve Ferguson

Zorana and I were making dinner once and I made a simple dish which surprising came out tasting pretty good. She said “ You must write and entry for my blog, Tasty Makes Happy”. I resisted. Ok, I am an engineer and not a creative writer. If you wanted to cook 10 of these at different temperatures and ingredient combinations , evaluate them in a blind taste test and show the results on a scatter plot I would be perfectly at home. That is not what she wanted. She said “ I want clicks on my website”. She proceeded to show me this graph ( which I could understand and felt very comfortable with ) that showed she was made $.04 in the last month from visitors to her blog. She said this is not acceptable and it needed to increase exponentially. Now I feel comfortable as I know the goal and as a task oriented person I can relate. So, here goes my recipe and attempt at creative writing. Please click on this page and some of the ads multiple times so I can achieve my assigned task of increasing the clicks exponentially. You may have to get some of your friends involved though to achieve this. Anyway here goes....

Here in Portand we may not be blessed with 300 days of sunshine and warm weather year round but we do have some pretty good local produce. There is an island in the Columbia River only a few miles from Portland called Sauvie Island that is known for it's farms and produce. On one trip there I saw an amazing display of squash that made me think there has to be a use for these things.

I purchased one of each of these.

I found ones that were firm and didn't have any holes or defects to speak of. It was not hard to find in the gazzilion on display. ( Ok, maybe it was not a gazzilion ).

I first cut them in half. I found this was not an easy task so proceed at your own risk. These suckers are hard to cut.

Clean out the seeds but do not throw them away. The seeds are really good if you rinse them, add some salt and toast them in the oven for about 10 minutes at 400F. Mmmmm.

I put about a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of light brown sugar in the hole. The amount is not that important. Sprinkle some brown sugar on the surface as well as in the hole. Add some salt and pepper.

I suggest you put this in a non stick pan as the sugar and butter can create a mess to clean up. This is not something Zorana worries about but I do.

Bake this for about 1 hour at 400F. Check them with a fork to make sure they are soft. If in doubt, cook them another 10 minutes. It doesn't really matter.

Here is what they look like.

Make more than you can eat as we found they taste even better warmed up the next day.

So if you liked this, click wildly on a bunch of stuff on this page so I accomplish my goal.

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