Butternut Squash Winter Salad

I'm heading out of town for the holidays, which is a great excuse to clean out my fridge. I won't describe the horrors I encountered therein, but they were many and disgusting. On the upside, I realized that I had all the ingredients for this delicious salad, which my mom introduced me to last winter. 

Perfect Butternut Squash and Arugula Salad

(with pomegranate seeds and feta!)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 

Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil and drizzle with olive oil. 

Peel and slice one butternut squash into uniform chunks. I like to peel the squash while it's whole with a sharp knife, but that might be because my vegetable peeler is wimpy.  Toss the chunks in the olive oil on the baking sheet.

In a small bowl, mix a few glugs of maple syrup (about 2 Tb) with a few shakes of cumin. Brush mixture over the butternut squash pieces and place baking sheet in oven.

After 10 minutes, take out the squash, flip the pieces, and brush them again. Bake for another 10 minutes, or until soft and starting to caramelize.

While squash cooks, wash arugula (I always skip this because I am lazy/Trader Joe's arugula seems pretty clean) and arrange on a serving platter. Crumble as much feta cheese as you want over the arugula. Sprinkle with pomegranate seeds or dried cranberries.*

When squash is cooked, arrange the pieces over the arugula. 

Drizzle with your dressing of choice and dig in! (I ALWAYS use Cardini's because

 it is the only dressing that matters, but there are several recipes floating around the internet for homemade vinaigrettes and such!)

*note: I have always used cranberries in this recipe, but I happened to buy a cheap pomegranate and thought I'd try it. It was delicious! I was excited to try a trick I read in an Ottolenghi cookbook: apparently if you whack the back of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon, the seeds will fall right out! Spoiler alert: this did not work. Maybe I wasn't whacking hard enough. I picked them out with my fingers, pretending to be Persephone the whole time, of course.

I don't even want to admit how much I eat this salad. I struggle through non-winter-squash months. If it wasn't for summer tomatoes, I don't know what I'd do!

Culinary Judaism

In college I trained myself to stay awake until midnight, at least, but I'm usually in bed soon after, and I have a blessed ability to fall asleep quickly and easily. I never realized what a gift this was until I met my husband, who routinely stays up until 3 or 4 in the morning and then can't sleep once he forces himself to get in bed. Sometimes, during those creepy dark hours when he's the only one awake, kept company only by our Tom Servo and Crow robots, he gets weird cravings.

Yesterday at the grocery store, he confessed that the night before, he had been tormented by visions of matzoh ball soup. That was all I needed to hear to go into full-blown culinary jew mode.

I'm technically Jewish on my mother's side, but I'm about as secular as you can get. I identify strongly with my heritage on a cultural level, but I've only been inside a synagogue to attend a funeral, and when my family connects with our practicing relatives to celebrate Passover Seder, I usually embarrassingly mispronounce something like charoses. I didn't even remember to light Hanukah candles this year! 

The food, though? I've got that covered. (Not gefilte fish. Are you crazy?) When it comes to the basics, I lean pretty heavily on Smitten Kitchen and her delicious latke recipe. I double it because 12? That's not enough. I also use her matzoh ball recipe for the balls themselves, which are always deliciously fluffy (I double those, too). But I've never pulled it together to make my own chicken stock - I'm still embarrassingly squeamish around raw chicken carcasses. I'll get over it someday! 

This time, I hopped over to another recipe - Orangette's simple chicken soup. I made this recipe as written a few weeks ago (I even found a chayote, which I'd never heard of, in our southern Maine Hannaford's!) and it was really, really good. I liked the unfinicky simplicity of throwing the chicken pieces right into the pot and cooking them with the soup, so I borrowed that technique here.

Julia's Assemblage Matzoh ball soup:

Follow instructions to make Smitten Kitchen's matzoh ball batter. Refrigerate for half an hour while getting the stock on the stove. Put a separate pot of water on to boil to cook the balls.

Put skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs in a soup pot (I used 4 thighs). Cover with chicken stock, making sure chicken is covered by several inches (think about how much soup you want in the end, and remember that the volume of chicken will be reduced when you remove the bones). I use Better than Bouillon.

While stock is heating, peel and slice 2-3 carrots and 2 stalks of celery. 

Bring stock to a boil, then reduce to simmer. Add carrots and celery. Simmer for 40 minutes, skimming off scum and foam that come to the surface.

Once the soup is simmering, pull out the refrigerated matzoh batter. Form balls as directed by Smitten Kitchen and drop into the bubbling pot (gently!). They should be done cooking at the same time as your soup.

After 40 minutes, pull out chicken. Shred meat, discarding the gross bones and skin. Add meat back to pot. At this point, if you like noodles in your matzoh ball soup, add them! (wide egg noodles are best!)

Cook until noodles are done, about 8-10 minutes. 
Your matzoh balls should be done now, too.

Ladle in matzoh balls. DEVOUR.

Forgive the cell phone picture - we were too hungry to be elegant!

I made my latkes first, because they're easy to keep warm in the oven. Eaten with sour cream and applesauce in front of the Democratic Debate - heaven! And this morning I had a few more, topped with Molly Wizenberg's seven-minute egg. It doesn't get better than that.