Skillet Sausage and Squash

I was going to call this one Spanish Sausage and Squash, but honestly, there's very little that is authentically Spanish in this recipe.  It IS, however, pure comfort food.  Stick-to-the-ribs food.  And sausage was on sale at the grocery store, not chorizo, but hot italian.  Now, if I put one more meal on the table with cauliflower this week, the kids were going to kill me, so I thought shredded squash was a better idea if I wanted to live through this week.  Besides, little secret, squash cooks down and its flavour completely disappears in tomato sauce.  If you have a sometimes orange-vegetable-adverse family like I do, this is one of those places to get it into them with minimal struggle.  Ok, this, and in chili.  Squash is awesome in chili.  And OMG, squash fries...  My parents are killing themselves laughing at me right now.  I HATED squash growing up.  I hated ALL orange vegetables except raw carrots and peppers.  I'm over that now.  Mostly.  Just don't feed me mashed squash or carrots.  Mashing them is a sin, and besides, it's just gross unless it's dessert food.

I googled "spanish spices" and apparently they include paprika, cayenne, oregano, and thyme, but then also cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and saffron.  Hmmm.  Where to begin, and what to include?  The answer?  Include whatever tastes good.  Throw the rules away.  When all else fails, return to rule #1 of paleo cooking; you take some meat, a veggie or two, throw it in a pan with some spices, and you eat it.  This recipe looks like a lot, but its not.  Its ready in a half hour.  There's just a lot of spices, and you can add or delete any that you don't like or don't have.  Maybe you have saffron.  I didn't.  That stuff is expensive.

Feeds 5-6
Ready in 1/2 hour

Ingredients:

2 lbs sausage, whatever kind you like
2 cloves garlic
1/3 spanish onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 c butternut squash, peeled, cored and shredded
2 (5 0z) cans tomato paste
1 1/2 c chicken broth
fat of choice for cooking
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp chipotle
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/2 tsp thyme
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp turmeric
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Prep everything.  The food processor is your best friend.  Have all your veggies chopped and/or shredded.  Chop your sausage into bite-sized chunks.  Have your tomato paste open and waiting.  Measure out the chicken broth.  Pull out your spices.

Heat a large skillet on medium heat.  When hot, add cooking fat and saute onions and garlic until fragrant and onion is translucent, add green pepper and saute for another minute or two.  Add all other ingredients, cover, and simmer for about 20 minutes until sausage is cooked through.  Taste and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

Micro-Chips

Hey, did you know that you could make chips in the microwave?

Yes, I just said that.

I came upon this recipe in Chatelaine Magazine Online-ok, it was more of a blogged food science experiment in Chatelaine (man, do I love Chatelaine).  I get twice-a-week emails from them with ideas and recipes and articles on everything about life in general.  I should really think about getting an actual subscription--but why bother killing all those trees when they already send me the emailed recipes?

Of course, I'm not eating potato chips.

But the possibilities..........

Butternut squash chips!

So I wanted to make squash fries.  I LOVE squash fries.  I love them better than sweet potato fries.  And they're lower in carbs.  Double-bonus!!  Now, being lower in starch than potatoes, squash fries tend to be soft on the inside, and crispy on the outside sometimes.  It's hard to keep them crispy for long.  I am continuously experimenting with ways to make them stay crispier.

So I took a small butternut squash and peeled it.  I ran it through the middle thickness blade on my mandolin. 

I brushed a bunch of slices down with olive oil.  I washed and then brushed down the microwave tray with oil, too.  I laid the slices out flat on the tray and microwaved for about 7 minutes.  I flipped some of them over.  I added a minute of time here and there until they were dry and beginning to brown.  I salted them and set them on paper towels and started again. 

It was time-intensive, I'm not going to lie.  But it was dead simple.  Any chips that didn't crisp up just kept going back in for another minute.  The best part was that they continued to crisp up once they were out.  Many of the chips were as crispy as real potato chips.

This was so simple, a teen could do it for an after school snack.  If you sliced a bunch of squash or sweet potatoes in advance.  That mandolin is scary.  I keep shaving my fingertips with it.

And if this recipe works with the high water content of squash, how awesome would it be with sweet potato?  And what about kale?  Can you make kale chips this way?  What if you had those stacking perforated microwave trays, and could put several layers in at once?  Oh, there will be some science going on in my household, I tell ya.

Now, I have no idea what this does to the nutrition content of the squash.  Microwaving veggies is often the best way to preserve the nutrients in them.  This method appears to be just dehydrating the vegetable, which isn't bad for the food at all.

To make these chips over-the-top awesome, mix some dip for them by combining home made garlic-basil mayo recipe here with a few dashes of hot sauce.  Seriously the best multi-purpose dip I've ever had.  I don't know how I lived so long without it.  I just devoured all the home made mayo in my house.  Damn.

Zucchini-Stuffed Flank Steak (Mock Duck)

Alright, so this was a really old recipe in my cooking "binder".  I'm sure you all have one of those binders--a combo of recipes torn out of magazines and glued onto pieces of paper and stuffed into plastic page-protectors, some hand-written recipes from friends and families, scraps of paper so old you don't know where they came from anymore, and many loose clippings floating around that fall out every time you touch the binder...  It's normal to have one of those, right?  Ok, so I actually have 2.  One is for dinners, the other is for everything else.  I have been called a recipe whore on more than one occasion.  I like alot of variety.  So I collect these recipes like a hoarder, but unless its a dinner idea, I rarely get around to trying half of them.  Fortunately, this is a dinner recipe, and I've cooked it many times. 

At least 10 years ago now, I was brave enough to have my grandparents over for dinner and without knowing that they both had dentures, I fed them this.  My mom told me about the dentures just as I was serving it and I had one of those "oh, crap!"  moments.  And held my breath.  And watched my grandfather carefully chew for a moment, before he declared, "Good mock duck--we never get this anymore.  Enid, how come you don't cook us mock duck anymore?"  And I stared at my mom, wondering, what the heck--I didn't cook duck!  This is beef!  He can't even tell the difference between duck and beef?  But eventually they clarified it for me, and we had a really good meal.  Sometimes these lean cuts of beef can be really hard to chew, but not this one.  Maybe I did an excellent job beating the crap out of it with the meat tenderiser, maybe I just happened to slow-cook it for long enough--either way, it came out great.

There is dairy in this recipe, but you won't actually be able to find the mozzarella once it's cooked.  It seems to become one with the meat and act as a kind of tenderiser, disappearing altogether.  Like how Parmesan does in tomato sauce.

Ingredients:

1 medium flank steak
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tbs olive oil
1 medium zucchini
2 tbs dried parsley or 1/2 c fresh
1/2 c grated mozzarella
3 tsp Parmesan
1-2 cans crushed tomatoes or diced, stewed tomatoes
salt and pepper
1/2 tbs Italian seasoning

2 cups (or more, your choice) cubed butternut squash--you could use frozen



Ready to cook, just sitting in my crockpot...



Directions:

Spread meat out on cutting board and pound meat thoroughly.  You want to break down all the connective tissues that could make this meat tough.  Get all your frustrations out on it!  Rub garlic on one side of meat, brush with olive oil, season with salt and pepper.

Slice zucchini into long, thin strips.  Graze mozzarella.  Cube squash if you are using fresh.  Arrange zucchini down middle of flank steak, sprinkle with mozzarella, half of the Parmesan and half of the parsley.  Carefully roll the flank steak so that when you cut it up later, you are cutting across the grain.  Tie or pin with toothpicks or skewers to hold it closed.

Oven version:
Heat oven to 325 degrees.  Place rolled flank in middle of roasting dish, spread cubed squash around the meat and pour 2 cans of tomatoes over squash and meat.  Sprinkle with remaining Parmesan, parsley, and add Italian seasoning.  Cover and bake for about 1 1/2 hours.  Baste 2 or 3 times.

Crockpot version:
Place tied meat in crockpot, arrange squash cubes around the meat, pour 1 can of tomatoes over everything, add remaining Parmesan, parsley, and add Italian seasoning.  Cover and let cook for 10-12 hours on low, or 4-5 hours on high.  Crockpots vary; check guidelines that came with crockpot.

It was the oven version I fed to my grandparents.  It came out plenty tender enough for them to chew.  You will notice that the crockpot version only requires 1 can of tomatoes because of the amount of juices that remain in the crockpot when you cook it this way.