I thought I’d bake some crab-stuffed fish for dinner tonight, and wanted a side dish to go with it. Why not toss some zucchini, yellow squash, and cubes of orange sweet potato in some olive oil, add a little salt, and cook it in the oven?
I asked the SO to get some ‘yellow squash that would go with zucchini’, thinking of something like summer squash. She came back with delicata squash, which I’ve never had before. Looking it up, this appears to be a sweet squash.
Should I just go with my original plan of chunking up the zucchini, squash, and potato and roasting them with olive oil and salt? Or should I do something different? If the latter, then what?
Your original plan should work OK. The squash will cook in about the same time as a potato, though I’d think that this would make the zucchini overcooked if you put them all into the oven at the same time.
Delicata is quite sweet compared to other squashes, which may be good or bad depending on your personal tastes. When I’ve experimented with delicata, I’ve found that a little dash of cayenne and some black pepper and salt go a ways toward taming the sweetness.
I was planning to cook the sweet potato chunks in the microwave oven a bit.
As I said, I have some crab-stuffed fish. (Pre-made, from Trader Joe’s; I’m working today.) I’ll made a Béchamel sauce to put on top. I wanted vegetables, but I always make asparagus or broccoli and wanted something different. Zucchini and Summer squash with some onion is good, but I thought it would be nice to throw in a note of sweetness with an orange sweet potato. I’m wondering if the sweet potato plus the delicata will make it too starchy and too sweet.
And the kicker is, she bought three potatoes, three zucchinis and two delicatas. Extra sweet potatoes aren’t a problem. We can eat those on their own. It looks like the delicata can be roasted the same way she roasts acorn squash, so we can do that with one of them. But what do I do with two extra zukes? (Maybe I’ll bread them and fry them, and we can eat them with ranch dressing while we watch football on Sunday. So much for being healthy! )
That mix sounds kind of gross to me, but then, I don’t care much for zucchini and I think acorn and delicata are both quite bland. It sounds like bland+bland+sweet.
Cut them in half length-wise and scoop out some of the seeds. Spoon in a thick meaty tomato sauce (like a Bolognese). Add bread crumbs and shredded mozzarella. Bake until the cheese is golden brown and the zucchini are soft enough to cut with a fork. We add a salad and/or soup and some garlic bread, and that’s dinner.
If you really have too many zukes - like when a neighbor gave me wife a few 5-lb monsters from their garden - make zucchini relish. Or don’t, because once you try it, you’ll never eat a hot dog again without thinking about how you wish there was some zucchini relish around.
Acorn squash and delicata squash are not together. I was just saying that delicata can be roasted like acorn squash.
I was looking for savoury + savoury + sweet (zuke, Summer squash, sweet potato), and what I have now appears to be sweet + sweet + savoury. I don’t know how it will go with fish. But I have to make these because the SO got them for me.
Not a big zucchini fan, but if you’re concerned about the combination being too sweet, you might consider adding a bit of a savory herb to your salt and olive oil. Rosemary seems like it might go well with it…but I’ve been accused of thinking rosemary goes with everything.
I still have a couple of small squash of this type (the official variety name is “Honey Boat Delicata”*) and think I may try them that way, possibly with garlic and eggplant.
*which is also a new nickname for Mrs. Jackmannii.
We liked the combination. I thought we’d have a lot of leftovers, but we had only a little. I used one sweet potato, one delicata squash, and two zukes. I’m not entirely sure about the zucchini in the mixture, but it wasn’t bad. The SO likes my lemon-dill Béchamel sauce, and put it on the veg. (She likes the sauce so much, she said she could eat it as a soup.) I didn’t care to even try that. I would have preferred something less ‘robust’ as a side dish for crab-stuffed flounder, but we’ll have this again.
I don’t like winter squashes, I’d only do the zucchini. I’d ditch the sweet potato, too, I just don’t like that. But those are my tastes, not yours, and you can go by your own tastes too. This is just what I would do.
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