Stuffed Acorn Squash

It's the first day of Fall and locally grown summer vegetables are played out, but seasonal fall/winter produce has started arriving in grocery stores.This includes a variety of hard squash like acorn, kabocha, sweet dumpling, delicata, carnival and pie pumpkins. 

Here is a link to a guide to fall/winter hard squash from Epicurious:

Visual Guide to Winter Squash

We like to make roasted acorn squash brushed inside with brown sugar butter and filled with chickpeas, couscous, onion, carrot, celery and dried fruit. It is perfect served alongside chicken or pork, or all by itself. The filling without the squash is a good side dish on it's own.

Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main
Ingredients

2 large acorn squash, halved and seeded

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon butter, melted

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 stalks celery, sliced on the bias

2 carrots, chopped

1/2 large sweet onion chopped

1 cup garbanzo beans, drained

1/2 cup golden raisins, chopped dried apricots or other dried fruit bits

1 1/2 tablespoons ground cumin

1 (14 ounce) can chicken broth

1 cup uncooked couscous

salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Preheat oven to 350.

Cut the squash in half lenthwise and remove the seeds.

Arrange squash halves cut side down on a baking sheet. Bake 30 minutes, or until tender. 

Dissolve the brown sugar in the melted butter. Brush the inside of the squash with the butter mixture, and keep warm while preparing the stuffing.

Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Stir in the garlic, celery, and carrots, and cook 5 minutes. Mix in the garbanzo beans and raisins. Season with cumin, salt, and pepper, and continue to cook and stir until vegetables are tender.

Pour the chicken broth into the skillet, and mix in the couscous. Cover skillet, and turn off heat. 

Allow couscous to absorb liquid for 5 minutes. Stuff squash halves with the skillet mixture. 

Roots in the Boot

This blog post is a little departure from food and gardening but I wanted to give you all a little background. Vazzano, Italy is our family's ancestral home. It is a small rural agricultural village of about 1,100 in Calabria, the southernmost region of Italy, the "toe" of the boot. The town dates back to the Roman Empire when it was called Subsicium. My great grandfather, Bruno Fuscà, came over in 1895 with his brother and two friends. He worked on the Pennsylvania railroad doing grunt labor for the next three years and saved his money. In 1898 he sent for the rest of the family - my great grandmother Marianna Nicolina DePalma,and my grandfather Domenico Antonio and his two brothers,Giuseppe and Francesco. They settled in Pittsburgh where Bruno bought a building which he converted into a combination grocery store and home. The store was on the ground floor and the family lived upstairs. At some point early on, due to an error in some important paperwork, our last name was mistranscribed from from Fuscà to Fusia. They decided to keep the new American name.

 

Vazzano, Italy

Panoramic video of the olive tree filled countryside around Vazzano

Out on a walk around Vazzano by Micuccio Caloiero

Just in case, some day, someone might want to visit Vazzano by flying to Naples and driving to Vazzano, here is a link to the directions - 
                                           

Driving Directions from Naples to Vazzano