"casserole" news and stories

There are few holiday dishes so polarizing as green bean casserole. If it was part of your usual Yuletide feast growing up, the stuff is sacrosanct and utterly essential to holiday joy. The bulk of it -- the french-cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onion strings -- must come blopping and clattering from cans and be baked in a casserole until it resembles a roiling green bog topped with a dry moss of frizzled onion straws. There are always seconds, and there's hardly ever any left over for a midnight refrigerator picnic.

If you didn't grow up with it skulking on the holiday table, good gravy, does that stuff look ten-foot-pole nasty.

The term squash covers a whole host of scrumptious fruits - yes, they are fruits.

They are grouped basically into summer squash and winter squash. Summer squash is harvested as an immature fruit, and winter squash is harvested in the fall or winter when it has ripened. Zucchini is probably the most commonly used summer squash, and winter squashes include everyone's favorites: butternut, buttercup, acorn, pumpkin, and spaghetti squash. The skin of a winter squash is hard, and requires cooking.

Squash can be a great, healthier alternative to potato or pasta in many recipes. Here are eight great ways to serve up squash, starting with one you don't have to cook:

1. Carpaccio of Raw Zucchini
2. Smoked Sausage, Butternut Squash, and Wild Rice Soup
3. Winter Squash Mash (with kabocha squash)
4. Best Ever Roasted Pumpkin Seeds (works with other winter squash seeds, too)
5. Baked Acorn Squash with Brown Sugar and Butter
6. Yellow Squash Casserole
7. Herbed Spaghetti Squash (if you fail, just dump tomato sauce on it and lie)
8. Pumpkin Pie Straight from the Pumpkin

These recipes are varied enough that you could make them all for one giant meal and have a squash feast! If there's someone in your life you have to lie to about there being squash in what they're eating, spaghetti squash with pasta sauce is usually a safe bet. Or, you can totally get away with soup - picky eaters often don't pay attention to the broth, just the stuff floating in there. Good luck and happy squashing!

It's no secret that I have all kinds of contempt for Sandra Lee. I won't go into my usual rant about how weird it is that her Chanel-quilted headband always matches her too-tight cashmere deep V-neck sweater, matches the drapes in her "kitchen," matches her potholders (oh wait, I just went into it!), because really, that just makes me sound like a jealous little you-know-what.

I will, however, say that as much as I am not fond of her, I do appreciate the philosophy of semi-homemade. Life moves pretty fast, and there are times when you just have to resort to using the $0.69 box of Jiffy cornbread mix because you don't have time to grow corn in your backyard, harvest the corn, shuck it, cut it, dry it, and do whatever else you're supposed to do to make cornmeal.

So I didn't actually even cheat. It wasn't like I was trying to make cornbread and had to use a mix out of convenience in the last minute. I actually have a recipe for this Sweet Corn Casserole/Cake/Bread/Souffle/Thing (I'm not quite sure what it is, and have no idea from where I copied the recipe a bazillion years ago) that specifically calls for the boxed mix as one of the ingredients. When I make it, I almost feel a little dirty.

But only until it cools and I eat it.

Here is the second baked pasta dish I made over the weekend (you can find the first one here). This one is more traditional, being that it uses sauteed onions, garlic and peppers. I made this one especially for the omnivores in the crowd, although I used turkey sausage instead of pork to keep the amount of fat a little lower. Especially since it used three different kinds of cheese.

The thing to remember about recipes like these is that you should feel free to make them your own. If you don't like peppers, leave them out. If you've got a friend who is allergic to ricotta cheese, use cottage or farmer's cheese instead. Feel like using three different kinds of cheese is sort of excessive? Cut out the parmesan. It's a technique more than an exact recipe and you can bend and shape it to your tastes.

For the last week or two, I've been feeling like my cooking mojo was off. It started with a sub-par batch of risotto. Then came the pizza dough that wouldn't rise and the dried cherry, pistachio and white chocolate chips that were inexplicably bitter. I was beginning to feel like I'd never cook successfully again. Until along came the baked penne pasta dish you see above.

Over the weekend I made two baked pasta dishes for a small dinner party (I'll post the recipe for number two tomorrow, as it was equally delicious). I realized that there were going to be some vegetarians in the bunch and so I plotted out two different sauces to accommodate the various eating styles. This one is the non-meat version and it was so good. It combines sauteed shallots, artichoke hearts, baby spinach, fresh ricotta cheese, pesto, whole wheat penne and fresh mozzarella. It got rave reviews and happily the leftovers have done nothing but improve while hanging out in my fridge. Follow the jump for the exact recipe.