Miso Sesame Winter Squash

In the last week I've done a bunch of things. I returned to a vintage shop, just up the street, to buy a pair of old metal kitchen stools (painted a muted shade of robin's egg blue). Someone beat me to it. I baked a granola pound cake (a bit of a miss), brewed two batches of California common, and bought a sack of stinging nettles at the Farmers market to work into the cottage cheese pancakes I can't seem to get enough of. There were three loads of laundry, two runs of the dishwasher, and lots of friends who've stopped by. And I made this Miso Sesame Winter Squash for lunch yesterday.

It's a riff on one of the recipes in Bryant Terry's new cookbook - his Molasses, Miso, and Maple Candied Sweet Potatoes. I swapped in some delicata squash and tofu for his sweet potatoes, and had myself a pretty spectacular one-pan meal. I'm a big fan of Bryant's recipes (remember these?) They're always flavor-forward, and across the span of a book he tends to pull from a global pantry. He has the ability to put together unexpected flavor combinations, and he's just the sort of person I like to turn to when I need someone to yank me out of one of those occasional culinary ruts every cook finds themselves in.

Here's how today's recipe shapes up. You've got your primary ingredients tossed with a citrus-spiked, maple-molasses marinade of sorts. The sappy sweetness is balanced by the salty complexity of miso and tamari/shoyu, and a toasted sesame backdrop is added for good measure. It works brilliantly. Thinking more about it, I imagine you could use the sauce/marinade to roast any number of ingredients beyond winter squash or sweet potatoes - for ex: tempeh, broccoli, cauliflower. Let me know if you do a take on this that works particularly well.

Thanks for the inspiration B. :) Cheers, and congrats on the new book.

Citrus Salt

I'm not kidding when I tell you it looks like a citrus orchard shook out its limbs in my kitchen. There are sweet limes and Meyer lemons on the counter near the sink, wild limes in the corners of window sills, oblong mandarinquats and petite kalamansi oranges scattered across other flat surfaces. And then, the prize of all prizes, a massive, electric-yellow Buddha's hand (direct from a very special Southern California garden) putting off more fragrance than the rest combined. So, I set to work making a spectrum of citrus salts.

They're pretty, and provide a pop of surprise, and your friends will love you even more when you hand them little jars to take home. Mostly, I use these as finishing salts. I love the wild lime salt sprinkled over coconut milk-based curries, or as a finishing touch on spring rolls. Mandarinquat salt sprinkled over homemade sea salt caramels? Give me a minute while I add that to my to-do list. Later in the year, the clementine and Meyer lemon salts are perfect on fava beans and asparagus. Beyond that, heirloom tomatoes.

I'm going to give you my basic technique down below. You can use that as a jumping off point and go from there. A lot of what this comes down to is personal preference. You'll notice I call for flaky sea salt. For this sort of thing, I like the kind of light, flaky salt crystals you can crush between your fingertips. I use Maldon. You give this salt a good, long toss with the citrus zest and then bake the mixture dry. You can certainly leave the salt like this, but I like to give it just a few pulses in the food processor to break it down a bit. It's still light and flaky, just less so. All said, feel free to experiment with different salts. And process them powder fine if you like. I typically use about 1 tablespoon of zest to 1/2 cup of salt, but you might want to increase or decrease the amount of zest. Again, play around. Make blends. Take notes related to which ones you like, and how you're using them.

One other note. You'll only use the zest here. But you don't want all that amazing juice to go to waste, so zest the citrus first, then juice it as well. You can freeze the individual juices for later use, or, I like to make riffs on this sort of strong citrus ginger juice.

Thank you!: The Food52 Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks is on. Heartfelt thanks to Nigella Lawson for writing such a thoughtful review and for putting me through to the next (crazy!) round.