The meal you see here is brought to you by Gretta Anderson and the Belmont Winter CSA Share, a beautiful feat of efficiency and bounty.
The Belmont winter share is distributed three times: one Saturday per month, Oct-Dec. You’ve got to go to the farm to get it, but it’s on the edge of town, not far from Memorial Drive and within very reasonable distance from Somerville or Cambridge. Gretta and her crew (of women!) ….. seriously have their shit together. Good eaters were ushered through an assembly line of pre-boxed and pre-bagged fruits and veggies with remarkable alacrity.
The share is $225 — a bargain, we think, if the next two deliveries are at all like the first. On Saturday we took home apples, sweet potatoes, cabbage, spinach, potatoes, lettuce, parsnips, onions, leeks, parsley, turnips, beets, squash and a pumpkin… and more. Combined, about 55 pounds of food. Assuming this is the average delivery, that’s around 1.36 per pound.
Now, about the meal in the photo: Our friend Erik recently showed us the glory of a stuffed delicata squash and this is our attempt to replicate. We cut the squash in half and scooped out the seeds, then roasted it until it was soft. Meanwhile, we fried sausage (courtesy of Austin Bros. Farm and the Central Square Farmers’ Market) and, in a separate pan, sauteed onions, leeks, garlic and apples. After the sausage had cooked and rested, we cut it up and tossed it in with the sauteed stuff.
By this time, the squash was cooked. We took it out and scooped out most of the flesh, which was added to the apple-sausage mix. This wasn’t that easy — the skin on a delicata, while ideal in that it’s edible, is also, well, delicate, and prone to tearing. Don’t let it.
We stuffed the skins with appley, sausagey + squashy mix, and placed them back in the oven, topped with a tiny bit of grated parmesan cheese (though I’d wager that any grated or soft cheese would be equally as delicious). Then we threw it on a plate next to Gretta’s extraordinarily robust spinach (raw and dressed with red wine vinegar+olive oil).