When I Have Time, I Cook

Yesterday we ended up with about a dozen people in our little tiny studio, eating dinner. I went running in the morning and then wrote all day and didn’t start cooking till a few hours before everyone got here. I’ve thrown my fair share of enormous parties with lots of food, but this one was the least labor-intensive and everything went together well and felt very autumnal, with pretty colors, too!

Here’s what I made:

• There was a bunch of cheese and french bread, grapes and mission figs and things of that sort.


• I made a salad of greens, with things to put on the salad, like chopped pears and pecans and carrots.


• I roasted a lot of butternut squash: preheated the oven to 400 degrees, split the squashes lengthwise and scooped out the seeds, put a tablespoon of butter in each of the halves’ cavity, sprinkled with brown sugar and salt and pepper, then roasted on a foil-lined cookie sheet for half an hour or so, till a fork went in and out of the thickest section easily. Then I cut each half into four pieces (for those counting, that means I got eight moderately-sized pieces out of each squash). 


• I roasted a bunch of green beans, too: washed them, spread them on a foil-lined cookie sheet, drizzled with a bunch of olive oil and salt and pepper, and roasted for 15 minutes in a 425 degree oven. They were still green beany, not crispy, and tasty as all get out.


• Finally, I did this: Slow Cooker Garlic Chicken with Couscous, which was easy and delicious and just cooks forever in a big heap in the crockpot. On a whim, when I got to the couscous part, I chopped some carrots up finely in a food processor and added some golden raisins and cranberries. I also used chicken stock to cook the couscous - I made a ton of it last week and needed to use up the last of it. It was very good. In fact, I am eating some of it right now.


• There was a very fine roasted garlicky gravy in which the chicken cooked, and I had a bunch of butternut squash left over, so I put the gravy in a dutch oven, thinned it out a little with chicken stock, added butternut squash, and heated it all up, then pureed it with my immersion blender (still one of my favorite things I’ve ever received or bought!). Instant roasty butternut squash soup. I think it’s probably especially good with croutons, and intend to eat it that way.

There was red wine and apple cider and (non-alcoholic) Jamaican ginger beer, and an apple crisp brought by one of the guests, and it was an altogether cozy way to spend an evening.