Plummelo

What do you cook when you need to quiet a racing mind?

It was our first Saturday at the market in a couple weeks owing to travel and family visits, and I had my answer as soon as I saw the giant butternut squashes on sale for only two bucks.

I knew you would buy one, said Tim after depositing our six-pound specimen on the counter.

A mere fork-tip of winter squash to the tongue always made me gag as a kid, and while I’m happy to stomach it these days (must have been Mom’s tough love), I still buckle at the thought of peeling these thick-skinned beasts. Will I bloody hack off my fingers? Please don’t let me bloody hack off my fingers!

When I’d started making winter squash soup five or six years ago, I’d turned for guidance to Mark Bittman, who advises that a knife works better than a vegetable peeler. It was wretched work, his method, axing off the odd-shaped hunks of skin from the asymmetric gourds.

Yet the soup–with chicken stock, onion, apple, and plenty of cream, plus my own dash of ginger–was such a rewarding remedy that I soon found myself scaring up squash every time I was in need of some hand-eye agony to distract my racing head. Trouble with sources? Butternut will help. Stuck on a story draft that won’t right itself? Bring on the warty, wrinkly kabocha.

And so, when the start of November coincided with a spate of bad news on the home front, I had myself a six-pound squash to wrestle. We had soup.

Next, there was a butternut squash and radicchio pappardelle, and me holding my breath as Tim took the first bite, on a Saturday night, when dinner cannot go wrong because if it does you hate yourself for not going out because you’re still young and you don’t have kids. (Tim had seconds.)

Finally, I still had, I don’t know, at least 35 cents worth of bargain-basement butternut to use up, and it was a night of waiting by the phone for word of a relative under the knife, so I chose Martha Stewart’s butternut squash macaroni and cheese, because for whatever reason, even those of us who never ate mac and cheese growing up still crave it as comfort food, and because by God had my mother known she could force-feed me squash via mac and cheese, you can bet she would’ve.

This time, I armed myself with our Cutco vegetable peeler.

I finished so quickly that I was stalled in the recipe, waiting for Tim to get back from the store with the other provisions. Then, when I realized we were out of Parmesan–oops…sorry, honey!–back to the store he went while I excavated the measuring tape from a storage crate to size up gratin dishes and clambered atop the step-ladder to scavenge the upper cupboards for a last ingredient.

I can’t find the bread crumbs, I wailed when Tim walked in with the cheese. Can you go back for bread crumbs? You have to go back for bread crumbs!

I started scrounging in the top of the trash bin for the stale baguette I’d thrown out earlier in the day, thinking it could be salvaged for crumbs–then looked up at Tim.

Are you out of your mind? his eyes were asking.

Well, yes. The phone hadn’t rung yet, and I’d figured out how to peel squash painlessly. It was a mixed blessing.

Note: Thank you to Ann Auer for the sharp, ergonomic Cutco peeler, which will force me to find a new therapy-food but has my fingers forever thankful. Get yourself one of these gadgets and then let me know what you think of roasted butternut squash with mustard vinaigrette, butternut squash and vanilla risotto, or squash and sage soup with bread crumbs. The pappardelle and macaroni and cheese mentioned above are sure things.

Read more by Kristen Hinman

Kristen Hinman writes the column Swine Dining: A City Girl Cooks Country. She used to think the perfect weeknight dinner consisted of an omelette and a glass of wine. OK, she still does. Her husband, on the other hand? Not so much. Luckily, three years of recreational cooking school in Paris and a vast cookbook collection mean she’s never at a loss for ideas. Kristen is a journalist who has lingered in celebrity chefs’ kitchens, nosed over midwestern caviar houses and taken pigs to slaughter–all on the clock. She lives in St. Louis and Washington D.C. and is the winner of two James Beard Foundation Awards for newspaper writing. One day she will wallpaper her pantry with Gourmet magazine covers. Visit Kristen’s website. Photo by Michelle Hudgins.