appetizers & snacks Archives • Ant & Anise

Roasted kabocha squash dip

Summer seems to have evaporated this year. It’s like I blinked and July was over, and the same happened with August. Now it’s back to school time. What the….??!

I’m always sad to see the end of summer, because it means that darker wetter weather will soon be taking over. But whether it’s summer or not, crunchy pre-dinner snacks rule around here. Mixed nuts, chips and salsa, chips and guacamole, chips and pico de gallo….you get the idea.

And while I could hoover up chips and salsa any day, in the back of my mind I know it’s better to be eating more nutrient dense food: Enter roasted kabocha squash dip.

I first got to know kabocha squash a few years ago. Not normally a squash fan, I went head over heels for kabocha. It has a lovely sweet flavor (especially if you roast it) and a lighter texture compared with other squashes like butternut or acorn. Not so heavy, you know?

Another great thing about kabocha squash is you can eat the rind. Really! One way we’ve been enjoying kabocha is in a salad: Wilted kale, roasted kabocha (rind and all) and dried cranberry is a lovely salad that is good warm or cold, and — bonus — it keeps for several days in the fridge.

Now you will need to peel the rind for this dip. But you do so after it’s roasted, so it’s easy peasy. Some fresh lemon juice for brightness, ground cumin for earthy spice and a few tablespoons of tahini for creamy….Eve, what did you say….unctuousness?

All I can say is it’s so worth it to have a colorful, nutritious dip to welcome in the unofficial beginning of fall.

Roasted Kabocha Squash Dip

Yield: About 2-1/2 cups

Ingredients

1 medium kabocha squash, roasted and rind removed
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons tahini
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
5 tablespoons hot water
salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste

Instructions

First, prepare the kabocha squash: Preheat oven to 400F and line a baking tray with foil. Cut the squash in half and remove the seeds, then slice the flesh into 1-inch thick wedges. Place wedges in a single layer on the baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil, then sprinkle salt and pepper over them. Roast for 20-25 minutes, or until the flesh is tender. Remove from oven and let cool, then slice off the rind. You should have about 14oz/400g of roasted squash.
Place the roasted kabocha squash pieces in a food processor with the blade attachment, and pulse a few times.
Add the lemon juice, tahini, cumin, cayenne pepper and hot water and puree until smooth.
Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula and ensure you have a uniformly smooth dip. If you would like it thinner, add a bit more hot water.
Add salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste, and transfer to a serving bowl. Just before serving, drizzle with a tiny bit of olive oil and serve with colorful tortilla chips for dipping. Enjoy!

Sweet Potato Latkes

It was good timing for me to see a film called Happy this week. November has always been one of my least favorite months, mainly because of the soggy grey days in Vancouver. Between that and the darkness that descends on the late afternoon, every day a little earlier, November makes me mostly want to crawl back under the covers and sleep until spring.

So it was encouraging to learn from Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor featured in the film, that only 10% of our happiness is dependent on our life circumstances (like where we live or how much money we make). Turns out a full 40% can be changed by intentional activities….

Pico de gallo

If you can handle a little chopping you can make one of the freshest tasting summer sauces ever, and one of my favorites: Pico de gallo.

I bought some prepared pico de gallo in July at Whole Foods. I was scurrying around getting groceries because I had house guests arriving and was running short on time.

Vacuuming up cat hair tumbleweeds trumped spending some time in the kitchen.

You would think with a dark brown/black cat, his clumps of light-as-air fur would blend right into the dark wood floor. But they don’t. It’s a disappointingly unforgiving surface that shows everything. (And while I am the family neat-freak I don’t follow the Unclutterer’s advice on taming fur tumbleweeds. I usually just try to ignore them for as long as possible. 4-5 days is as good as it gets before I’m yanking the vacuum out.)…

Garlic scapes and mushroom crostini

Ah yes, garlic scapes. This is only the third summer in my life that I’ve run across them, because of the CSA.

Working with ingredients that I don’t seek out regularly is partly why I love getting a weekly surprise box of vegetables every summer. It’s a challenge to make something good — as in, wow I want to make this again — when a key ingredient is unfamiliar.

Last year I made a garlic scape pesto, and eventually used it in a summery pasta dish with some prawns. (Truth be told, I found the pesto way too garlicky right after I made it. It hid in the back of the fridge for at least two weeks before I worked up enough courage to use it.)

This week when the scapes arrived in my veggie box, I thought I’d try a different tack. I mean, scapes are part of the garlic plant. They’re pungent. Maybe not as pungent as the bulb of the garlic, but there’s no mistaking that it’s garlic. So what, then?

…

Hard to Beet Hummus

What a brilliant idea it was to split a community shared agriculture box from Cropthorne Farm. And I think the strategy of alternating weeks, rather than splitting each box is going to work out just fine too.

In fact, when I read the CSA’s email about this week’s box, and saw garlic scapes in the mix again, I was delighted on two counts: it’s your week for the box, and it’s the last week of garlic scapes.

There’s the rub with eating local: if you want the joy of saying “that came from our farm,” then you have to like what grows there.

As satisfying as they are to look at – curvy green snakes! how cool is that? – I can easily wait a year before eating garlic scapes again. They’re okay, just underwhelming.

Ah, but the beets, that was another story.

I roasted them – four medium sized beets – the day I picked up the box – and served one still warm from the oven as the delicacy it was, cut into segments, and sprinkled with a little salt.

We could have just eaten them like that. But I wanted to expand my repertoire of beet recipes. Remembering your parsnip hummus, I searched for beet hummus recipes and found the Minimalist Baker’s – just one beet, and a 14-ounce can of chickpeas, but still proof-positive that someone had made beet hummus and liked it enough to post it.

We agreed that more beets would be better and ditched the chickpeas. There was a lot of tasting – at first I put in too much tahini, which had to be balanced with more lemon – but in the end it was very good indeed.

Three medium beets turned into what seemed like a very large quantity of hummus. We ate all but half a cup before dinner, with fancy carrots and cucumber, both from the CSA box, and tonight I finished off the last of what was left, making pretty canapés with a Cropthorne cucumber and mint from the back deck.

And yes, I’m happy to say that the beets came from our farm.

Hard to Beet Hummus

Serving Size: 6-8 people

Bob, your best beloved, made so many puns, so steadily all night that I can’t remember if “Hard to Beet Hummus” was his best line or not. As a recipe title it is, indeed, hard to beet. Allow at least an hour for roasting the beets – even better, roast them the day before.

Ingredients

3 medium beets
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 tablespoons tahini
2 to 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon lemon zest
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
Black pepper to taste
2 fresh mint leaves for garnish (optional)

Instructions

To roast the beets: Preheat the oven to 375 F. Scrub the beets and trim off greens and long roots. Toss the beets in a teaspoon of olive oil, enough to coat, and season with salt.
Cut a large piece of aluminum foil, enough to make a sealed package that will hold your beets. Place the beets on a baking sheet, and roast for an hour, then check for doneness. A knife should easily penetrate through the beet.
Set aside to cool. when the beets are cool enough to handle, remove the skin. It will rub off easily.
In a food processor or blender combine beets, garlic, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Blend until you have a smooth paste. Taste and adjust for seasoning.
Transfer the humus into a bowl, and garnish with mint leaves cut into chiffonade

Parsnip hummus

Do you like parsnips?

Ummm…well, I don’t dislike them. But I don’t go out my way to find them either. I guess I appreciate them more than I used to. Does that count as a yes?

When I was growing up parsnips didn’t make their way into too many of our dinners. As in, almost never, at least on the Johnson side. (Eve, can you think of a time?)

No, we stuck to the basic root vegetables: carrots, sometimes rutabaga (which we called turnips, but were really yellow-fleshed rutabaga), and potatoes. Especially potatoes. A never-ending rotation of mashed, boiled, baked, and, for special occasions, scalloped. And then more mashed ones again.

On the Neely side of the family, parsnips turned up only once every few years, around Christmas. At my cousins’ place my aunt Glennys made candied parsnips, with heaps of brown sugar and butter to make them more appealing to everyone, especially the kids. I knew my sweets though, and the candied parsnips didn’t have me fooled. When the parsnips got passed around the table to me I remember taking a token one or two small pieces, just to be polite.

Enter the CSA. This was our second summer enjoying a weekly box of fresh vegetables from Cropthorne Farm in Ladner, and I love it. Well, mostly I do. It’s exciting to see the season unfold week by week and to try veggies I don’t normally buy.

But every season, there’s a few weeks where my culinary creativity sinks to a low ebb. Maybe it goes on summer holiday. At those times, when I open up the weekly box and see something I don’t regularly eat — like kohlrabi or parsnips — I’m apt to shove it to the back of the crisper, thinking what am I ever going to do with that?

That’s exactly how I felt when we got parsnips 3 weeks in a row in the CSA box. I secretly hoped that Bob would discover them in the fridge and roast them all up for a big Sunday night dinner à la Jamie Oliver.

No such luck.

So I took up a challenge for myself: Find some inspiration, somewhere, and make a respectable dish out of the parsnips. Not a boring side dish you’ve seen before (boiled or roasted parsnips), and not a slavishly strange creation you’ll never see again (Heston Blumenthal’s parsnip cereal). More like a simple, slightly offbeat dish that would appeal to almost everyone over 12 years old.

How about parsnip hummus?

Yes, parsnip hummus. An earthy, thick spread of cooked parsnips, tahini, garlic and spices. Some lemon juice and zest for brightness, and a little olive oil and melted butter for a velvety mouthfeel. The texture is like hummus but lighter, a little sweeter and spicier than one made with chickpeas. (And Eve, everyone happily enjoyed more than a token amount at your dinner party. I’ll take that as two thumbs up.)

Parsnip Hummus

This is a fantastic way to use parsnips in an unexpected way. It's a healthy, gluten- and grain-free appetizer that pairs well with raw veggies or crackers. Plus, you can make it a day ahead of time.

Ingredients

1 lb parsnips, peeled and cut into 2-inch thick pieces
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
juice + zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon ground cumin, toasted (*see note)
1 teaspoon ground coriander, toasted (*see note)
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, toasted (*see note)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for drizzling (optional)
fresh vegetables, crackers or bread for dipping

Instructions

Place the parsnip pieces in a medium saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer over medium-low heat until parsnips are tender, about 5 minutes. Drain and transfer to food processor.
Add lemon zest and juice, spices, and olive oil and blend together until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the processor, add the butter and blend together again. Add salt and pepper to taste. If the texture is thicker than you prefer, add a little more olive oil or lemon juice. If not using right away, cover and refrigerate.
To serve, spoon hummus into a ramekin or onto a plate, drizzle with some olive oil if desired, and surround with slices of fresh vegetables, crackers or bread. Makes about 1-1/2 cups.

Notes

Toasting and grinding your spices helps to boost their flavor: Heat spices in a dry sauté pan over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until fragrant. (Keep a very close eye on your pan, as the spices go from fragrant to burnt in no time!) Remove from heat, cool, then grind in a spice grinder. I use an inexpensive coffee grinder which I use exclusively for spices.