South Indian Squash

katienotinnola

Aug 20

I have always (almost always) cooked with a plan. I write a menu on Thursday at dinner and shop on Friday afternoon (with a swing through the farmer's market on Saturday in the growing season). But sometimes in the summer vegetables happen, whether through the generosity of friends or through impulse purchases or through the productivity of our little garden plot. Then one has to figure out what to do with the unexpected. Here is a recipe if you find yourself with a medium-ish squash and some cherry tomatoes. The recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East vegetarian cookbook.

The ingredients:

1 yellow squash, to yield about 2 cups when cut up (I had yellow zucchini which is more uniform in shape than crookneck, another yellow variety);

2 cups sliced onion;

2 cups cherry tomatoes;

4 tablespoons regular oil;

1 teaspoon cumin seed;

1-1/2 teaspoon kosher salt;

1/8 (or so) teaspoon black pepper;

1/8 (or so) teaspoon cayenne pepper;

1-1/2 tablespoon lemon juice; and

1/4 cup chopped parsley.

I started by washing and cutting the ends off the yellow zucchini and then I cut it lengthwise into quarters and sliced the quarters into 1/2"to 3/4" chunks.

Next, I cleaned the onion and cut it in half up and down (pole to pole, as it were). I cut each half into thin half-moons.

And I washed the cherry tomatoes and minced the parsley.

Next, I heated the oil in a skillet on medium-high and added the cumin seed when the oil was kind of hot. I let the sumin seed sizzle away for maybe a minute or two.

I think this is an action video of what happened next: I added the onions to the hot oil and cumin and stirred it around while the onions sizzled.

https://draft.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxmBrqoZ_chnAfGsD4mgoYnpcdvaLXMOGqI18zQ-QtkyWRUGow35io0FPuJj9HDOWGBPbePBWvrebUmflIlVvuMB4dV9LchSlS6Ug90JwXcLTHYlxBzn8RGEABqPn_qPiST8A

After a few minutes (the onions started to soften, but no browning), I added the tomatoes. I turned down the heat to medium and put a lid on the skillet. After about 5 minutes, I took the lid off and used my potato masher to mash some of the tomatoes.

If you are using chopped big tomatoes, you probably will not need to mash. The cut-up tomatoes will break down all on their own.

Here's a picture of all of the meal prep at once (except for the salad and the blueberries). The covered saucepan has basmati rice, steaming. The covered big skillet contains potato-yogurt curry, for which there is a recipe somewhere on the kitchen blog, and the little skillet is banana raita, for which there is also a recipe somewhere on the blog.

Shortly after that picture was taken, I added the squash, the salt and a little bit of water (like 1/4 cup) to the tomato-onion mixture. I stirred it up, put the lid back on the skillet and let it cook on medium for about 15 minutes.

I gave the skillet a stir or two during the cooking time. The idea is to cook the squash so it's done but not turned to mush.

After about 15 minutes, the squash had reached the correct consistency and I added the lemon juice, black pepper, cayenne pepper and chopped parsley. No picture of this addition. I gave it a stir and it was ready.