My podcast guest for Episode 042, "No Beaches in Berlin", Lenka Salinger, shared this elegant layered, sliced butternut squash dish with us. Think of it as a delicious, slightly sweeter, more colorful cousin to Eggplant Parmesan. I made three to photograph. After shooting around lunchtime, they went so quickly that I hurriedly assembled the rest of the grilled squash into additional stacks of squash, cheese, a rich tomato sauce full of olives, and topped with sesame seeds and fried sage. My oldest son wandered down into the kitchen where my husband and I were indulging in seconds. After that, the second set of stacks disappeared just ask quickly!
Here's Lenka's charming story about where she discovered this dish and how she improved it. Make sure you hear more about Lenka's delightful story in Episode 042!
"About 7 years ago I participated in a neuroscience congress in the beautiful city of Florence. A friend from high school lived in Bologna and one day she took the train to come and meet me. We were looking for a place to have lunch and we really wanted to make a good choice. So we walked around for a while, without finding anything that convinced us. We started to ask people for their recommendations and in the end, after getting hungrier and hungrier and tired from all the walking we came out a little plaza with a place that looked like the exact right choice. There was a table at the window that looked like made for us - but it was occupied. We decided to wait. So finally we were sitting at the table and a waiter brought the menu. We started to read it and I was asking my friend for the translations. I wanted something vegetarian. But almost everything seemed to be meat - but not only that, it was basically all intestines. At that point we realized that we had chosen a "tripperia" - a special place for intestines for our perfect lunch! Not something my meat eating friend was drawn to at all. But there was one vegetarian dish: Parmigiana a la Zuccha Gialla. I got it. And I couldn't have been happier. It turned out to be a stack of butternut squash with tomato sauce and cheese. And I decided to recreate it at home. Later that day we had some more wine and something stronger at a little bar, and then some beer at another plaza and we finished laughing so hard, that we were both crying and couldn't stop for half an hour or so. It was one of the first recipes to publish on my blog (you can see that in the photos), and I'm pretty sure it's the recipe I've made the most over the years. It's simple, but satisfying and also rather impressive to look at. It's the perfect dinner when friends come over. And not only I have cooked it a lot, but my mother has, and my brother, my cousin and I guess some strangers were delighted by it as well."
[spacer height="20px"]
Episodes Related to This Sliced Butternut Squash Recipe:
"No Beaches in Berlin" with Lenka Salinger
Follow The Storied Recipe in Your Favorite Player
How to Connect with Lenka:
This dish on Lenka's old blog (see below for her latest blog): www.caramelo.com
Instagram: @lenkas_lens
Website: www.lenkaslens.com
){kind=link}
Keep the screen of your device on
Ingredients
½ small ½ butternut squash (around 400g)
1 1 Mozzarella
a few slices a few Scamorza (optional)
fresh Parmesan cheese
1 small 1 onion
1 1 garlic clove
1 can 1 plum tomatoes
1 sprig 1 fresh basil
a few a few black olives (optional)
1 teaspoon 1 sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon 1 muscovado sugar (optional)
1 1 bsp olive oil
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 190ºC. Peel the butternut squash. Cut 6 round, 1cm thick slices of the upper and lower part, it’s fine if some have a hole, but you don’t want it to be big. Put them on a baking tray and sprinkle them with 1 teaspoon olive oil and ½ teaspoon salt.
- Put them in the oven for 20 min. Meanwhile, chop the onion and the garlic and fry with the rest of the olive oil until transparent (3-5min). Add the tomatoes, the salt and pepper and the muscovado sugar (a little bit of sugar is a tip from an italian grandma, to balance the acidity of the tomatoes, and dark muscovado sugar adds an interesting note). Use a wooden spoon to crush the tomatoes. Put in the basil leaves, torn into pieces with your hands.
- Let it simmer for 20min, until it acquires a thick texture. Cut the Mozzarella and Scamorza (if you use) into slices. Take out the butternut squash and put a spoonful of tomato sauce on top of two of the slides.
- Add a slice of mozarella and scamorza, some of the olive slices and a little parmesan cheese. Put another butternut squash slice on top and repeat adding the other ingredients. On top of the last one add some more of the parmesan.
- Put into the oven for 10 more minutes or until the cheese is melted and getting a little brown and crispy on the top. I added a few leaves of sage fried with a little olive oil and formed little balls of pumpkin seed butter.
Notes
- Make sure to listen to Lenka on The Storied Recipe Podcast, No Beaches in Berlin with Lenka Salinger while you make her Layered Sliced Butternut Squash Recipe!
Did you make this recipe?
Tag @thestoriedrecipe.podcast on Instagram and hashtag it #thestoriedrecipe
Like this recipe?
Follow us @thestoriedrecipe on Pinterest
Would love to hear from you!