Seed and slightly hollow out your winter squash (acorn works best) and bake or microwave it until sort of al dente. Place squash hollowed-out side up on a baking sheet and set aside.

Saute 1/4 to 1/2 lb. sausage meat (any kind, though we usually used a 'breakfast' sausage) until cooked through. Saute some diced onions in the resultant fat. Combine onions and sausage. (For a vegetarian option, simply saute the onions in the fat of your choice and crumble in some thawed veggie sausage patties - it's just as good.)

Season onion/sausage mix w/ some combination of black pepper, sage, thyme or other similar spices to taste. Fill squash cavities w/ mix.

Prepare one box of cornbread mix according to package directions. Pour/spoon cornbread batter over squash.

Bake filled & encrusted squash at the temp. and time recommended for the cornbread mix; remove from oven when crusty/golden brown.

Feel free to tinker with recipe as tastes dictate; it's quite flexible and forgiving...

But yes, acorn squash with a stuffing in it is Good Eating.

But, hey, whacking a hard winter squash apart with a big knife (usually my 10" Solingen) or cleaver, preferably with one blow, is one of those Manly Prowess things we guys like to do now and then.

(Speculation on any Hidden Meaning behind guys and their big knives will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

My version of stuffed acorn squash:

Wash the squash, stab it around the diameter, put it in the microwave and zap for 10 minutes.

While squash is zapping, slice mushrooms, make sausage patties (or other fatty meat things), grate mozzarella cheese.

When the microwave buzzes, use potholders to get the squash out. Depending on your tolerance of steam, either cut the squash in half and remove the seeds now or do it a bit later when the squash isn't so hot.

Stuff halves with mushrooms, seal the top of the half's cavity with the sausage patty. Zap for three minutes, add the cheese, zap for another minute.

As to stuffing other squashes, I used to stuff pattipan squashes, which are pretty small, with herbed bread crumbs and also zap.

It's for precisely this task that I own both a cleaver and a rubber mallet. Insert the cleaver just far enough into the squash to get the cutting line established, then tap the cleaver with the mallet to split the squash. Works every time; no bloody fingers.

(Baking, that I can manage. I can whip up some damn good experimental cookies. But as soon as I'm trying to make non-sweet things edible, it all goes to heck.)

Does anyone have an idea why it's so hard to get any squash over here except butternut and for two weeks in October, pumpkins?

(It's not that my household has some sort of luddite aversion for the nuker, but a kitchen will only hold so many things and ours is at capacity. In addition to the usual culprits, it mostly contains a toaster oven, a crock pot, and an ungawdly amount of tea.)

If you can get the squash apart when it's in the robust, raw state -- if all else fails, put it on a hefty plank and use an ax -- there's nothing at all says you can't bake the thing in a regular oven.

Scoop the seeds out, heave in what you wish to add, cover with foil to discourage drying out, and there you go. Bake at 300 or 350 or so until toothsome.

I have a tendency to throw in bacon fat, dried cranberries, maybe cubed bacon, mushrooms, and maple syrup, but almost anything up to and including outright bread works.

<HomerSimpson>Mmmmm... Bacon fat...</HomerSimpson>

I think you're on to something, Andrew. They've done the superheated-water-in-the-microwave already, and I think I remember something about Coke cans in a hot car. Have they done the "woman who thinks she's been shot, but it's only biscuit dough" yet?

Man, I love that show.

--claire

My brothers dubbed them Gunpowder biscuits.

Hmm, all (or almost all) squashes are of American origin, including pumpkins. (The ancient Irish made jack-o-lanterns, but they carved them from turnips, believe it or not.) The word 'squash' is from a native (Algonquian, IIRC) word, influenced by the homographic English verb. Still, being American hasn't stopped the potato from taking hold. Not sure why.

Ooooh, ooooh! Pick me, pick me! I've got a good one!

Baby bottles.

The bottle in question was filled with soy formula, though I'd imagine similar results would have been obtained with real moo juice. I had been helping a carless friend by schlepping her and her newborn around. In the resultant chaos, a bottle was abandoned on the rear window shelf of my car. I took the car to work and parked on the top level of the parking garage - in the heat of a Washington, DC August.

I came out that evening, and couldn't for the life of me figure out what that white splash was across the rear window. Upon opening the door, a wall of stink extruded from the car like Play-Doh squeezed through your fingers. It may have been a hallucination induced by the odor, but I swear I saw a shimmer as air was displaced by this abomination. Imagine the odor of wet dog mixed with the funkiest cheese smell you've ever smelled, and add a whiff of vomit - then tack on at least one order of stinkitude.

When I came to, what I found in the car was something akin to the gun-in-the-car scene in Pulp Fiction, only with small-curd cottage cheese. A mere quarter of an inch of mostly solid matter suspended in vile yellow fluid remained in the bottle.

The cheesy smell passed in the matter of a week or so; it was about four years before the wet dog aspect of the smell went away.

The two states certainly aren't mutually exclusive, and either would suffice for this tale. (Though in her defense, pregnancy does Strange Things to one's brain. Now that I'm a parent myself, I fear the damage is irreversible.)

As Mr. Steyn said of the brakeless Land Rover heading up the hill, "Don't worry. It'll come back."

Paula HM, It's a small patty and it cooks in the four minutes it's in the microwave. The thing about it being fatty is that the squash sort of caramelizes.

rams: The ingredients ring a bell, but we mix it all up in a bowl and then pour it into the pan. We've also begun to play with different vinegars. Balsamic adds a nice richness, while apple cider vinegar sounds better than it tastes.

Occasionally I cook a smallish squash in the pressure-cooker, but squash responds to turning down (or up) the heat *much more slowly* than most pressure-cooker recipes do, so one loses in anxiety what one gains in time. Might Go Boom.

Syncronicity strikes again. The exploding baby bottle story is ringing my bells at the moment--I very recently had a large milk spill in the back of the car, and have yet to do anything serious towards cleaning it up. It was about a half cup or more of milk pooled in the back seat which, due to all the running around like decapitated chickens we do when we're late for the airport, was allowed to soak in. The smell right now isn't nearly as bad as in protected static's tale, but it does linger. I'm guessing that nothing short of taking the seat out and steam cleaning it will suffice. That or wait 4 years. Bleeeeargh.

It could be done, I think, but probably not to the satisfaction of most people. Except, perhaps, as a pumpkin pie variant.

Nicole: might I suggest one of the enzyme-based cleansers like "Nature's Miracle"? While it never got rid of the smell entirely, it certainly dulled the edge, much more so than any of the more conventional cleansers we tried.

One can substitute coffee for water in the chocolate cake recipe.

Truly the end times are upon us.

Grated Spam? Just from a practical point of view you'd have to freeze the stuff to get it solid enough to go across the blades!

Come to think of it...what with the post-holiday bulge...

No, no.

My mother's chili:
crumbled, fried hamburger
kidney beans
canned crushed tomatoes

That's it. Notice anything missing?*

My mother's spaghetti sauce:
crumbled, fried hamburger
canned crushed tomatoes

My father claims my mother makes the best chili and spaghetti sauce he's ever had.

*chili powder

Serve with boiled rice and yellow vegetable* of choice.

*properly cooked green vegetable.

For years afterward, I expected to see a newspaper article with the headline "Young Bride Bludgeoned To Death With Own Meatloaf".

(Confession: I actually like Spam, on an occasional basis. Wouldn't want it on a regular basis, even if it weren't so loaded with salt and grease, but sliced and browned in a skillet... it ain't a bad treat.)

Jenn - I, personally, think that winter squash with honey, nuts and dried fruit would be great for dessert. I'm outnumbered 2-1, though.

I might, however, be able to get The Man In My Life and his brother to eat mirlitons (pronounced more or less "millitanhs"), with stuffing. For some reason, they don't seem to feel those are squash, even though they are.

The traditional New Orleans presentation is

stuffed w/ seafood,.

A thing with diced mirlitons, pork, a spare sausage, apples, the Louisiana trinity of onion, celery and bell peppers, and savory, sage, rosemary and thyme was popular enough here that I noted it down for repeats.

Only in America! (This was a few doors from Langer's Deli, home of some of the best pastrami on rye you'll ever meet. Yes, they do cream soda.)

PJ, I've never had any kind of spamloaf, but meatloaves made with ground beef and/or turkey can be made in cupcake shape to good effect. I call them "meat muffins," and leave them unfrosted, though I suppose one could do something with a thick tomato sauce. They're great for packed lunches and feeding toddlers.

There useta was a military cap called a mirliton, shaped sorta like an upside-down flowerpot. It was most common, my in-house military historian tells me, in the age of Frederick the Great. The only pics I could find were here
and here.

The second pic is fuzzy, but shows diagonal lines winding downward around the cap. When made of cloth rather than metal, the cap had a long tail that was wrapped around it.

There's supposedly some worn in
picture #16 on this page, but I couldn't get it to expand from thumbnail.

Nope. Further inquiry reveals that Pyotr Ilyich's mirlitons were toy reed pipes.

According to kazoos.com,
and answers.com,
which is actually a Wikipedia page, kazoos are a type of mirliton - a musical instrument which uses a vibrating membrane. The latter shows just how many meanings the word has. Including French slang for "doggerel".

Here's another.

The meatloaf my mother usually made used a tomato sauce-brown sugar-vinegar mixture partly in the loaf and partly as a topping, put on before baking. I think that's the sort of topping you have in mind, yes? It's tasty. (It has never looked like frosting, though.)

I've never tasted them, but they definitely exemplify the British genius for food names guaranteed to drive foreigners out of your restaurant.

You start with 1.5 lbs of ground meat and 1 box of Stovetop Stuffing. Additional liquid, seasonings etc. to make it how you wish.

It must be midnight, it sounds like a war outside. both fireworks and gunshots (yikes).

Happy New Year!

It seems to me that the third of three items in the twice-weekly menu is, by itself, enough to cast doubt on their description of the dish as a delicacy. "The family, including Lewis, 13, and Grace, 7, eat faggots twice a week, with mashed potato and mushy peas."

After some searching, I did find a good description of faggots. (Go about halfway down the page, or just search for "faggots".

Hereweith a receipt.

It says that they're traditionally served with pease pudding. Which does sound better than "mushy peas," a phrase which brings to mind those canned abominations.

mirlitons: that's my grandmother's annual assignment at any family get-together. Mirliton-Shrimp Casserole. I do not have the recipe to share, sadly, but I surmise that aside from the title ingredients there is probably onions, celery, and garlic (my Mom's family seems to suffer from a genetic intolerance to bell pepper, so I grew up on an adulterated version of the Louisiana cooking trinity).

I am going to try the squash thing today, with a mix of things-that-are-in-the-house (cornbread, italian breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, crumbled vegetarian meat substitutes because the fridge is empty of actual meat, turkey fat because no vegetarians are actually eating this, maybe some pecans, definitely some onion and celery and garlic). If I can't get it halved in the raw with a knife, I do own a handsaw.

My chili recipe is meatless, but has five different kinds of beans, lots of mushrooms and onions, crushed tomatos, and prodigious quantities of chili powder, along with (shhh!) a tiny little bit of hot Madras curry powder.

It takes hours and hours to cook, because you have let the tomatos stew until they aren't bright red any more. And since I can't eat it anymore...*shrug*

Indeed. My mother never cooked a vegetable that didn't come out of a can. Chicken was boiled until it fell off the bones. She served some hilarious meals. Most of her dishes were hamburger-based, including her "beef stroganoff"--you don't want to know. I liked her meatloaf, though. My father taught high school (English) and she got the recipe from one of his students, a boy who cooked for himself because his mother was out of the picture.