Monday, October 10, 2005

In my humble opinion

Today I made butternut squash baby food again. After the weird peely skin thing last time, I took mom's advice to halve the squash, scoop out the seeds, and bake them. The jury is now in on which method is better.

All you moms wishing to make baby food from butternut squash, listen up.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THE BAKING METHOD.

Sorry, mom, but it was way more work. I would rather have the weird skin for one evening than all the work involved with the baking method. All told, it took about 5 hours - and I'm actually still not finished. Here are all the steps involved: halve, scoop seeds, bake 30 minutes, flip, bake 30 minutes, cool 30-60 minutes, peel, blend, soak pans that have burned-on goo (that's the step I'm not finished with yet). The steps for the other method are: peel, cube, boil, blend. Much easier, faster, but with a strange side effect.

So, my conclusion is: wear gloves and don't bother with the oven.

7 comments:

Kate Giovinco Photography said...

lol I will keep that in mind.

Have you tried buying the already peeled and cut butternut squash in the grocer's produce section. I am sure they sell it around you. All you do is boil and blend.

I will see if I can find the name of it next time I go to the store.

Katie said...

That's a good idea, but my whole point in doing this is to save some money. The whole veggie is only 99 cents a pound by me right now, so I'm stocking up. I'm too Dutch to pay for convenience foods - I'd rather just put on some heavy lotion before bed!

Kate Giovinco Photography said...

No problem the whole container is less than 3 dollars and full is almost 2 pounds. By the time the skin and all is off it probably comes to the same price. Good luck.

MLE said...

I don't have a hard time cooking that stuff at all. Use an ice-cream scoop for all of it--first to get the seeds out, and then to get the meat out later. I cook it for 25 or so minutes--put an inch or so of water on the bottom of the pan first (or put some olive oil on it, but you don't want that for the baby). Use a scoop that is the curved kind with the sharper point (not the kind with the lever for kicking the scoop out). I've never had a problem at all with squash--and I make it almost once a week this time of year! I think cutting the stuff raw is more work--it's so hard! Anyway, there's my 2 cents. All this talk is making me hungry--time to head home, since I'm needed back here in an hour and a half!

Anonymous said...

Or just do what I do and don't cook squash...
But, yeah...I'm getting sick of cafeteria food.
On Thursday, I'm chili!

Anonymous said...

oops, I mean I'm COOKING chili! :)

Katie said...

OH, COOKING chili. I thought maybe you were going to morph into a yummy dish. I'll be the cornbread and we can be a meal for Halloween.