Roasted Corn Pudding in Acorn Squash

Autumn is upon us in full swing now.  you can taste it in the air, and on the plate! Our first season with the CSA Organic Farm is still filling our kitchen with fresh produce.  More often than not the problem is losing track of what produce we have to work with.  I need to come up with a chart or something that will show me what we have in stock.  One thing that infuriates me is finding produce that has gone bad because I forgot we had it in the fridge!  It almost happened to some Bok Choy, but I discovered it in time and sautéed it up quick with some garlic, olive oil, white wine and soy sauce!  Saved!  Now I still need to figure out what to do with two Napa Cabbages before they go bad!  On the other hand, Erika and I got one lonely Acorn Squash from the CSA and wondered if it was one too many, as I didn't know what to do with it.

It seemed as though most treatments for Acorn Squash involve baking it with brown sugar.  While that sounded OK, It didn't truly excite, and with only one squash, I figured there wasn't enough to work with for a soup.  That's when I came across the website 101 Cookbooks, hosted by Heidi Swanson.  She had Acorn Squash filled with a corn pudding and covered with cheddar cheese, and this seemed like a much better direction to me!  I varied slightly from Heidi, who diverged from a recipe by Karen Hubert Allison in her book The Vegetarian Compass. 

Ingredients:

One Acorn Squash, Split down the middle, and seeded.

Olive Oil Cooking Spray

Corn kernels from one medium ear, uncooked (about 1/2 to 1 cup).

1/8 cup creme fraiche

1/8 cup skim milk

1/4 tsp fennel seed, crushed

1/2 tsp parsley flakes

2 eggs plus one egg white

shredded cheddar cheese.

Now here is where I usually put in my disclaimer about ingredients.  This time is no exception.  The original recipe called for 1 cup milk, I had creme fraiche and skim milk, so I used half each...  A lot of my experimentation is simply based on what I find available and think will work at the time. The recipe called for anise seed, I had fennel which has an anise taste... the recipe called for one egg plus two whites, I didn't want to save a yolk...  Given the choice I would use white cheddar instead of yellow, purely for appearance. 

First spray the split, cleaned squash halves with the olive oil spray, sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper and put them in a 375 degree oven for about 40 minutes.  

Mix the other ingredients well in a bowl, except for the cheese.  

At 40 minutes, remove the squash from the oven, sprinkle a little cheese on it, then fill the cavity 3/4 with the pudding mixture. The amount of filling described in the ingredients will probably be way too much for the squash to hold, but not way too much for you to want to eat!  This explains the ramekin seen next to the squash in the above photo. After filling the two halves of squash (way past 3/4 by the way), I still filled 2 ramekins. 

Bake for another 1/2 hour to 40 minutes, until the pudding is set.  You will be able to tell when you move the baking sheet!  

When they are completely cooked, sprinkle the cheese on the top and carefully finish under the broiler for a minute or so...  don't let them burn... KEEP WATCHING!  

When they came out of the oven, the puddings in the ramekins were twice as tall as in the photo, they fell as they cooled. 

This came out better than expected!  The corn pudding took me back to holiday dinners of my youth, with the creme fraiche adding a slightly more refined tang.  The corn pudding in the ramekin comes in handy when you run out of it in the squash!  A nice warming dish on a cold rainy day!

Thanks to: www.101cookbooks.com