Acorn Squash Dumplings From Hell
A long time ago I was watching an episode of Good Eats all about squash (or “pumpkin” for my friends down under), and Alton Brown made these very yummy looking butternut squash dumplings. Since it’s the season for squash and we have a bunch of them floating around, I decided to give this dumpling recipe a try. Instead of using butternut squash I decided to use acorn squash, since we have a few extra acorn squash that hadn’t been spoken for yet.
Well, first thing I noticed was that a lot of the comments indicated that the recipe didn’t really work right. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of flour, but people frequently found they needed 5 or more cups of flour to get the dough to actually come together. “No problem,” I thought, “Surely this won’t be an issue for ME!”
About 6 cups of flour later, I was wishing I had taken their advice.
That was the first problem. The second problem was that it turns out that I really don’t like dumplings all that much. Even when the last step is to pan-saute them in butter. Unfortunately, now I have about 200 squash dumplings in a bag in the freezer. I figure that at the very least, they’ll be good for throwing at stuff. They’re little rocks when they are frozen, and once thawed they will adhere to anything you throw them at.
There was one benefit from the endeavor though - I discovered how nicely nutmeg goes with squash! I had a bottle with about six nuts in it, and I really didn’t know what to do with them, but nutmeg will make a very nice addition to my butternut squash soup. I definitely think there will be some tweaks to that recipe in the near future…
June 6th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Sorry to hear you dumpling recipe did not turn out. I love acorn squash, but have never made dumplings with them. I did once, however, make a squash cake that did not turn out. A few friends and I took it out in the back yard and had a food fight with it. So I guess your idea of tossing around dumplings for something to do at least has a precedent:)