Squash & Gourds
1180 recipes found

Cucumber Yogurt Salad With Dill, Sour Cherries and Rose Petals
Crunchy cucumber, cool yogurt and the surprise of tart cherries make this salad alluring, especially when paired with a hot, savory stew, soup or tagine. During Ramadan, the month of the year when observant Muslims fast during daylight hours, it is delicious for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast at sunset. Try it with harira, the traditional Moroccan iftar dish: a fragrant lamb-tomato soup with chickpeas, lentils and vermicelli. Add a pretty bowl of dates — the food Muslims traditionally eat first to break the fast — and the meal is complete. Both spice and craft shops sell food-grade dried rose petals, or you can make your own by hanging a bouquet of (organically raised) roses upside down to dry.

Chicken and Pumpkin with Dumplings
Asha Gomez moved to the American South from Kerala, a region of southern India. This recipe, from her book "My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India into a Southern Kitchen," marries Southern-style dumplings made with rice flour and Indian flavors. The dish relies on stewing the chicken, a technique common to both cultures. Although smaller, dense pie pumpkins work here, they can be stringy and have less flavor than other forms of pumpkins and hard squash. Ms. Gomez likes calabaza squash, also known as West Indian pumpkin, which has a mottled skin that can range from dark green to light orange mottled with amber. The dusty blue-gray Jarrahdale pumpkin works well, too. In both cases, you will have a lot of pumpkin meat left over to cook, purée and freeze for baking or soup. The kabocha squash, or Japanese pumpkin, which has a dull, deep-green skin with some celadon or white stripes and averages about two to three pounds, is another option.

Spaghettini With Zucchini

Cheddar, Cucumber and Marmalade Sandwiches
Melissa Clark came up with this recipe in 2011, a sandwich for her daughter, against the one she made for herself with Branston pickle in place of the marmalade. (Branston pickle is a British pickled chutney, made with vegetables, that dates back to the early 20th century.) You can certainly make the grown-up version. But this sweet, salty, cool variety is close to perfect for lunch or a light dinner.

Baked Risotto With Winter Squash
This is not a classic stirred risotto, in which broth is added little by little, requiring the cook to stir and stir. Instead, the rice is tossed with squash and cheese then baked under a layer of bread crumbs until fragrant and browned on top. Welcome as a hearty meatless main course, it may also be served alongside a roasted chicken. Use any kind of hard winter squash, such as butternut, kabocha or Hubbard. Here are more great risotto recipes.

Pumpkin Dumplings

Pumpkin Puree

Sweet and Salty Grilled Steak With Cucumber Salad
The marinade on this steak is inspired by a classic Vietnamese dipping sauce called nuoc cham. Since it consists mostly of pantry staples – Asian fish sauce, brown sugar and garlic – all you need to pick up on the way home are some fresh limes and jalapeño. Nuoc cham works as a salad dressing, too. Here we drizzle it on crisp cucumbers and radishes, but sliced ripe tomatoes work just as well. You could serve it as it is with the salad on the side, or put everything on top of a bed of rice noodles or rice for a more substantial meal.

Maple Pumpkin Pie

Butternut Squash Pasta With Bacon and Parmesan
In this cozy weeknight meal, roasted butternut squash and Parmesan are combined for a dish that’s flavorful but not too heavy. A bit of thick-cut bacon adds crunch and smokiness. If you don’t have thick-cut on hand, you can certainly use thin-cut, but keep an eye on it, as it will cook through faster. Be prepared to pluck it from the oven once crisp and allow the vegetables to finish cooking at their own pace. A handful of chopped fresh herbs added just before serving gives this comforting dish a bit of brightness.

Chlodnik

Tian
The tian is both a vessel and the name of what’s cooked in it: summer vegetables, sliced quite thin, arranged in careful layers, drenched in quality olive oil and then cooked in a slow oven until each individual vegetable surrenders to the others, becoming one. The true and complete melding of earthy zucchini, sweet onion, waxy potato, juicy and acidic tomatoes is the great achievement of a well-made tian, and resting the finished dish after cooking is no small part of that success. By using a cast-iron pan and starting on the stovetop during the build, covering with a lid along the way, you speed up the cooking significantly. Season every layer and generously drizzle each with olive oil to bring out tremendous flavor and aroma. The Sungold tomatoes are beautiful and bright and quite acidic — perfect against the other flavors — but I find the skins unpleasantly leathery-papery when they are cooked, so simply peel them first. Dropping the tomatoes for 30 seconds into seasoned boiling water splits their skins readily and they slip off effortlessly. I would even say it’s kind of fun.

Butternut Squash, Caramelized Onion and Spinach Lasagna
This rich fall lasagna from Kim Quay, the owner of Comfort Food, a catering and prepared food business in Morrisville, Pa., makes an excellent main course for vegetarians and meat-lovers alike.

Warm Lentil Salad With Balsamic Roast Squash
This recipe started out as something else. I had in my pantry a bag of mixed sprouted lentils – black, green, and brown. I cooked them with the intention of making dal, but I so liked the integrity of the cooked lentils – green and black lentils remain intact even after they soften – that I didn’t want to mash them. Meanwhile I had roasted some squash with balsamic vinegar. I ended up warming the lentils in a cumin-scented vinaigrette and serving them with the squash.

Salmon and Cucumber Tartare With Wasabi Sauce
This makes a delightful hors d’oeuvre, appetizer or even a light supper. If you’re serving it as an hors d’oeuvre you can spoon it onto cucumber rounds, small endive leaves or toasted pita triangles. The better the salmon, the better this will be (sashimi grade is the best).

Julienne de Legumes (Vegetables in julienne)

Whole-Roasted Stuffed Delicata Squash
Here is a vegetarian dinner course of impressive size and heft, to rival any stuffed chicken, turkey or loin of pork. The interior is a riff on a kale salad run through with croutons, dried cranberries, blue cheese and a spray of maple-scented pecans that complement the sweet flesh of the squash. You could use small sugar pumpkins for the main event, or really any sweet-fleshed winter squash, but delicata squash is our favorite option for reasons of taste and beauty. Unless you are serving it as a side dish, avoid the temptation to cut the squash vertically, to create boats for the stuffing. Boats are for side dishes. They are halves of a whole. For a main course, serve a squash per person, standing tall on each plate.

Chicken Wings in White Wine Sauce

Savory Roasted Pumpkin Pie

Vegan Pizza With Apple, Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onions
This satisfying cold-weather pizza from Chloe Coscarelli, the vegan cookbook author, makes a great main course, or it can be cut into pieces as an appetizer. The creamy white bean purée made by whizzing cannellini beans, oil, lemon juice, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper in a food processor makes this dish seem like a real treat, and the piles of caramelized onions, roasted butternut squash, apple and spinach finish it off beautifully. If you're a half-hearted vegan, consider sprinkling a handful of blue cheese over the top a few minutes before it's done baking. We won't tell.

Three Sisters Stew
Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, recalls being taken out by his grandfather on the family ranch to shoot his first duck for Thanksgiving at age 9, when he was so small that his grandfather had to brace him from behind to help absorb the kick from the shotgun. Game is found on many Thanksgiving tables in the state, but other traditions predate the hunt. The trinity of corn, beans and squash was central to the agriculture of the Plains Indians in what would later become Wyoming, and some cooks honor that history each Thanksgiving with a dish called Three Sisters stew. The writer Pamela Sinclair’s version is a highlight of her 2008 cookbook, “A Taste of Wyoming: Favorite Recipes From the Cowboy State.” The stew works nicely as a rich side dish for turkey, and can easily be adapted to vegetarian tastes by omitting the pork and adding a pound of cubed butternut squash instead.

Spicy Lamb Sausage With Grilled Onions and Zucchini
This is modeled after North African merguez, which is sometimes served as part of an elaborate couscous meal, but good on a bun, too. For its deep rust-red color, merguez relies on lots of dried sweet red pepper (paprika) and a goodly amount of hot red pepper (cayenne). Garlic, cumin and coriander are strong supporting players.

Greek Baked Squash Omelet
Greeks often add yogurt to their omelets, which contributes calcium, protein and bacteria long believed to help digestion. Yogurt also gives the omelet a light, fluffy texture. Make this with winter squash in winter and with zucchini in summer.
