I made squash!

[sabotabby]

I'm super proud of this one because while I love squash—love it, every kind of squash—I am lazy af and just buy the pre-cut kind. So lazy, in fact, that when my friend dropped me off a squash I did not recognize what it was and had to ask. Anyway, it's a spaghetti squash, and I have never cooked one, so I looked it up and found this recipe.

I pretty much followed the recipe except I heard it helps if you put water in the bottom of the baking sheet when you're roasting, so I did that. I doubled the garlic. I also did not discard the seeds because I'm not a fucking monster—those look exactly like pumpkin seeds and I bet if you roast them they taste the same. Anyway I'll find out because that's the plan.

The squash itself turned out beautifully:



The recipe is not even that hard. Really, the only challenge is cutting the squash. I had to saw it with my bread knife, which ruined one half of the skin, so it was not as a e s t h e t i c as it could be. But it's very tasty and makes a ton. Would totally do this again, may need to get myself one of them knife-sharpening implements.

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

Spaghetti squash is one of the ones we don't seem to get here, but that looks amazing.

I would probably keep a few of the seeds unroasted, and plant them in the spring.

[franklanguage]

I have roasted many, many pumpkins and squash, and I find the seeds a little hard to take, because of the seed coats. They're tedious to de-hull, or if you eat them with the hulls on, they take forever to chew—although I admit they have more fiber that way.

However, I like to spray them with a little tamari or Bragg's Liquid Aminos, and let them dry.

[sabotabby]

See, I like the seed coats. They give it cronch.

[sabotabby]

That's never worked for me, sadly. I just don't have enough gardening skills, or space.

[ironed_orchid]

I mostly manage to grow pumpkins and potatoes when using the trench compost method.

[franklanguage]

Thanks for the tip; trite as it may seem, every time I've made spaghetti squash, I've always put marinara sauce on it. And capers. And—non-dairy—cheese.

[sabotabby]

That was most of the recipes. Which sounded good, because those are all things I like (well, not non-dairy cheese) but seemed a bit too much like making the squash substitute for pasta. And as a defiant carbs lover, it's just not the same.

[minoanmiss]

Hooray for squash!

Sawing them open can be dangerous. Can you get a small hatchet? If you do, can you resist the urge to leave the house with it?

[sabotabby]

I feel like I need to invest in a hatchet. Cause I'd be totally safe with it. Yup.

[scruloose]

Or a cleaver! This really is an ideal job for a big ol' Chinatown cleaver. I bet you'd be the only vegan on your block proudly displaying a, er, 'meat' cleaver (and chopping block, presumably) in your kitchen.

That said, I am firmly of the opinion that anyone who has a kitchen with knives in it really should have a decent knife-sharpening implement--unless they're going full bourgeois and taking their knives to be professionally sharpened on a regular basis. (Dull knives are not only less useful and more hassle, they're also much more dangerous, because the harder you're pushing to try and cut through something the less control you have and a dull knife is likely to slip off the thing you're trying to cut instead of biting smoothly into it...) In case you're interested in a specific recommendation, I keep wanting to pick up this Lansky kit¹. It looks kind of elaborate, but the little clamp-and-guide setup lets you get the angle between sharpening stone and blade consistently right without having to put a lot of time and practice into perfecting your technique, and that angle is the difference between 'nicely maintained' and 'ruined'.

The only reason I've had trouble justifying that kit myself is that I already have a dual-grit sharpening stone, a steel for kitchen knives, and a Crock Stick, and juuust enough practice with them to do an okay-ish job sharpening my knives the hard way.
(...Oh wait, as it turns out, I have just ordered the thing. Um, oops?)

1. James, whose product recommendations have never steered me wrong, has one of the Lansky kits (not sure whether it's that exact one), and IIRC reports being happy with it.

[sabotabby]

I am embarrassed to admit that I don't know the difference between a hatchet and a cleaver.

[rdi]

I figure a hatchet is like a small axe and a cleaver is basically a small kitchen axe with a higher ratio of blade to handle.

Sharpening steels are great once you get used to them. The joy of using a freshly sharpened knife is a wonderful thing.

[scruloose]

I'd say that's all quite accurate. More specifically, I believe a hatchet is a small axe that's designed to be used one-handed, like this. A hatchet is generally intended for small wood-cutting jobs like lopping branches off a felled tree or splitting chunks of log into kindling, whereas a tree-felling or log-splitting axe would be much bigger and heavier, with a long handle for two-handed swinging.

A cleaver, that slasher-movie standby, really is functionally a one-handed kitchen axe. The design is way more optimized for kitchen use: the longer and less-curved edge is less prone to lodging deep in your chopping block or splitting it right in two, the substantially thinner blade makes a cleaver halfway-usable for slicing (which even a wickedly sharp axe really isn't), and the way the handle attaches to the blade makes a cleaver much easier to get clean once it's all gucked up with the brains of your enemi--I mean squash guts. But! The cleaver is the only kitchen knife I know of that's actually designed to be swung so that the weight of the thing helps carry it through whatever you're chopping--like an axe. In Chinese cooking, this is the tool used to chop a barbecued duck piece into one-inch-thick chunks, bone and all, which is a glorious and terrible thing to watch.

So, if you were to position a squash on a chopping block in such a way that it won't roll off and your other hand is nowhere near it¹, then one decisive whack with a cleaver should, well, cleave it asunder in a very efficient and satisfying manner.

Also yes, I agree that a sharpening steel is a great tool. Once you're comfortable with the technique, using a steel for frequent touch-up sharpening works very well and is kind of fun. That said, a steel doesn't have a coarse enough grit to be much use in restoring the edge on a knife that's been neglected long enough to be really dull or has chips or damage to the edge from being kept in a cutlery drawer or whatnot, and success really depends on getting the technique just right--especially the angle of the blade against the steel. Given that there are more forgiving and versatile options that will still get at least as good an edge, I wouldn't really suggest a steel as the first or only sharpening implement to pick up. (Doubly so if one is not confident in one's dexterity and/or doesn't care to spend the time--and possibly damage the edge of a knife or three--getting the technique down.)

I completely agree that the joy of using a freshly sharpened knife (especially if it's a nicely balanced, good quality knife) is something special. There's a certain visceral satisfaction to it.

1. I mean it about that 'other hand' thing. There's a guy on our local rock-climbing circuit who's missing the last joint of one pinkie finger because as a kid he figured he had sure enough aim that it would be okay to balance the log with his hand...

[franklanguage]

When I butcher a squash, I usually stab it like a watermelon; a spaghetti squash is about the size of the watermelons I usually get anyway.

For sharpening knives, I have an electric rotating grindstone I never use, but we always used to use a whetstone we oiled with 3-in-one oil. Now that Richard is dead, "we" is me.

Lastly, I always took a hatchet to be a small axe; although I know what a [meat] cleaver is, I tend to always think of Beaver and Wally when I think of "cleaver."

[scruloose]

Yep, in terms of practicality, I have found that using a chef's knife and doing the "stab deep then slice in a downward pivoting motion" works well on melons and squash. It means passing up an excuse to wield a cleaver, but it gets the job done.

Those electric grinding-wheel sharpeners are pretty nifty! Some of the "wet stone" ones with the horizontal wheel, a little water pump, and blade-angle guides are full-on professional sharpening systems. They're not cheap, and they run the risk of grinding away too much of the blade awfully fast if you don't have a light touch and/or you use too coarse a wheel, but they really are amazing machines.

The plain ol' whetstone is a classic for a reason. It takes a bit of practice to get the angle nice and consistent (though I'd say that's easier on a stone than it is on a steel, especially with a nice big stone that sits solidly on the table while you work) but there's no fussy setup, you can get decent quality whetstones in a variety of grits for not a lot of money, and after a very reasonable amount of practice you can use 'em to sharpen anything from a fillet knife to a log-splitting axe. Personally I would use light mineral oil if you don't want to bother with specific honing oil... 3 in 1 works, but it's not exactly food-safe (which really isn't a problem as long as you wash your kitchen knives after sharpening) and I find it has a pretty obnoxious engine-oil smell that'll continue emanating from the stone for ages. The Lansky kit I was recommending is honestly nothing more than a few different grits of whetstone that come with a clamp to hold the knife and a little guide to keep the angle just right on each stroke so as to cut down on the learning curve and make it easier to get good consistent results.

I think the only sharpeners that I would rate "No! Stay away!", particularly for a beginner, are those tungsten V-notch things where you plunk the knife in and drag it through two or three times and that's it. They peel off an alarming amount of steel with each stroke, many of them don't offer different edge-angle options for fillet knife vs chef's knife vs pocket knife, and a little wobble in your stroke instantly does a startling amount of damage to the edge. They're cheap and simple and they'll put an edge on your knife RIGHT NOW, but wow they reduce the life expectancy of a knife dramatically. (As a first step in rehabilitating a really damaged blade they can be useful, but for regular upkeep sharpening? Just no.)

I definitely feel you on the meat cleaver/June Cleaver thing! Almost every time I hear the word cleaver, my brain helpfully mashes up both of those meanings, so I get this vivid image of June Cleaver in her perfect 50's outfit and hair, with a forced plastic smile, charging out of her perfect suburban kitchen wielding a blood-spattered meat cleaver. Apparently this connection is not the obvious Photoshop-fodder I thought it would be, as an image search for +"June Cleaver" +"meat cleaver" came up with zero hits. Internet, I am disappoint.

[mistersmearcase]

Oh yeah, I used to get something like that near work a lot until I ate it like seventy times in one week and got sick of it. I should give it a go again. We're cooking a bit more than we used to.

[sabotabby]

You can do many things with it that are not the usual thing.