All Stuffed Everything: Mushrooms and Winter Squash with Kale Apple Sausage Stuffing

It's time for the things that you reach for when you want something hot and filling and savory, and if you're like me, you have ALL THIS SQUASH. For the rest? Clear out your fridge! The key elements here are the greens (which are chewy and slightly bitter), the apples (which are soft and sweet), the meat/cheese/mushrooms (which are substantial and savory), and the starch, which adds bulk. With those parameters, play around with whatever you've got!

Ingredients: 

• 4-5 small squash or 1-2 large squash. Any kind with a large cavity will do - acorn, delicata, dumpling, or even pumpkin, why not?
• 2 leeks or 2 onions, or one of each.
• 1 bunch kale
• 2 large apples or 3 small ones
• 1 package whole button mushrooms
• 1 cup dried fruit. I used raisins.
• 2 stale sandwich rolls or 1 cup dried-up takeout rice
• 1 egg
• about 3 tbsp worth of savory cheese. Almost any kind will work. Blue is nice.
• optional: 2 sausages

Directions:

Cut your squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Save them - you'll use them in a different recipe.

Cook your squash. If you really really want to, you can roast them, but it's much less trouble and time to simply turn them cut side down in a microwave safe dish and cook it on high for five minutes. Prod it with a fork and see if it needs more time. It probably will. They're done when you can sink a fork into the flesh without much resistance.

While that's going on, core and chop the apples. Chop the tough upper leaves off the leek, and mince the rest up nice and fine. Put a little fat in a skillet and start frying the apples and leeks together.

Next step you can do in the same skillet if you want, but I decided to keep the two separate so I could have some vegetarian stuffed squash in the mix. Henceforth the meat skillet will be Skillet 2, and the apple skillet Skillet 1.

For Skillet 2, pull out the stems of the mushrooms and mince them. Mince the second leek or onion. Begin frying the sausage in Skillet 2, breaking it up as it cooks. Add the mushrooms and onions and cook them all until the onions are caramelized.

 Chop your kale finely and add it to Skillet 1. Add the dried fruit. Cook until the kale is wilted; you may need to add a splash of water to the skillet to help it along.

I have some old stale sandwich rolls in the freezer that had no conceivable use other than as bread crumbs. If you have something similar, crumble one roll into each skillet. You can use basically any starch for this. I've used uninspiring takeout rice. You could use couscous or quinoa. Either way, about half a cup per skillet.

Add an egg and about a tablespoon and a half of savory cheese to each skillet. You're using the cheese for flavor, not for bulk, so the stronger the better. Stir it all together and shut off the heat.

Pack your mixtures into the mushroom caps and the squash halves, and put them in a 350 oven for about half an hour. Check on the mushrooms after 10 minutes. The squash may need more time, depending on how well you nuked them beforehand.

These will keep very nicely in the fridge and make a great ready-made meal during the week, when you can't be bothered to come up with something else. Stick one of these beside a cup of soup, and you are good for Fall. 

Grilled Meatballs Variation 2 - Lentil Collard Meatballs

So last week we brought you the grill variant of Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs, but you know that I never make just one recipe at a time. So here's another variation on the grilled meatballs idea. As you can see from my garden box, I have lots of lettuce, but I also have lots of collards. Could they also be incorporated into meatballs?

Pictured, top to bottom: beets, collards, kale, lettuce

I think I'm trying to see how far from meatballs I can take this and still call it meatballs. Certainly meat is not the main ingredient here. It adds some nice flavor and holds things together.

These come out a bit blander and a bit drier than last week's variant - not unpleasantly so by any means, but they're less conducive to just popping in your mouth. These I would serve with some sort of sauce - maybe a garlicky yogurt-based one, maybe a chutney. Alternatively, you could just cut down the proportion of lentils and collards to meat.

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground meat (I used beef, you can use whatever you like)
• 2 cups cooked lentils
• 2 cups cooked collards
• 2 eggs
• 3 cloves garlic
• splash of oil
• splash of soy sauce
• seasonings (I used about a tablespoon of creole seasoning mix)

Instructions

Wash your collards and slice them finely. You can wrap your bunch of collards to form a tight roll and cut thin slices right through it; that'll give you about the size you need. Depending on how big and tough your collards are, you can also include the stems if you cut them finely enough. If they're particularly robust, though, tear out the stems.

Heat the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic, dump the collards in and start cooking them down, stirring frequently. You may need to add a splash of water to help them cook down. Add a splash of soy sauce, at least two tablespoons worth. You want the greens to be thoroughly wilted. They won't lose as much volume as the lettuce you cooked last week, but they will shrink a bit.

Cook your lentils, if you haven't already. Actually, if you're not starting with cooked lentils, you'd better do that as the first step. Lentils don't take as long as other dried beans, but they'll take you at least half an hour.

Mix all ingredients - meat, lentils, collards, eggs, seasonings - together. If you want to, blend everything in a food processor. I didn't, in this case, but I would next time. It's a pain to clean and sanitize a food processor after having meat in it, but it does give a very fine even texture to the mixture.







Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs, and place them on a greased cookie tray.

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Grilled Lettuce Meatballs (Variation 1)

Grilled. Lettuce. Meatballs.

I have some garden boxes in my front yard, and despite the best efforts of April to kill off my first seedlings (snow halfway through April? for reals?) they are now flourishing, to the extent where I have to have a good excuse NOT to eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That was why I was so excited to see Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs.

Look at this! Isn't it pretty? It's an old bookcase full of lettuce!

The other thing I've been trying to figure out how to do more of: grilling vegetables. Meat's expensive, after all, and grilling, in addition to being delicious, doesn't heat up the kitchen. Turns out that if you put the heat on medium-low on the grill and put the top down, you can bake stuff in it just like an oven. It may be a bit more imprecise (well, for sure it's more imprecise with me; if you're the committed type you could maybe figure something out, I don't know) but that works just fine for a recipe like this.

The harvest from the box above

I really like these. The lettuce is both delicate and earthy, so these taste more complex than just a regular ball-o-ground-meat. You can, I suppose, treat them like other meatballs and put them in sandwiches or sauces, but if you put out a plateful of them at, say, a barbecue, I don't think you'll ever get that far!

Ingredients

Don't be afraid to squeeze the lettuce to bunch it for chopping.
You're going to be sauteeing it anyway.

• 1 lb ground meat (I used ground beef; you can try ground turkey, add in some ground pork, why not, if you can get it from a decent/affordable source)
• 1 cup breadcrumbs (this is a great way to use up stale bread, heels of bread, buns that you toasted but that nobody ate, that sort of thing. This is not a recipe worth buying breadcrumbs for.)
• 2 eggs
• 1 Whole Mess of Lettuce (I guess about 3 cups? 1 head? 1 garden box worth?)
• Splash of oil
• Splash of soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic (or, you know, more. Garlic's good.)
• Seasonings (I used oregano, thyme, and adobo powder. Mess around. )

Instructions

Chop it up about this much.

Wash your lettuce and chop it nice and fine. I chop it crossways.

You'll lose a lot of volume here.

Heat up the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic a bit, and then add the lettuce. That's right, you're sauteeing the lettuce like it was a bitter green. WHAT. I know, why didn't you think of that, right? It's all right, I didn't think of it either, but you bet I'm doing it now. It'll wilt up pretty fast, so keep stirring it around and don't let it burn. Add the soy sauce - a couple tablespoons or so. Turn off the heat.

It's about 1:1:1 bread:meat:lettuce by volume.

Get a bowl and mix together the remaining ingredients: meat, breadcrumbs, seasonings, eggs. Add your mess of lettuce. You can mix this together by hand or you can stick it in a food processor. I've tried both ways and they both work fine; it depends on the sort of texture you like in your end product.

Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs and stick them on a greased cookie sheet. You can put em right up next to each other. They're not cookies; they'll shrink rather than expand.

Ready for the grill

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium-low grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Cost:

• Meat: $3.50
• Breadcrumbs: Marginal; come on. If you don't have leftover bread, wait till you do to make these.
• Eggs: $.50
• Lettuce: Free from the garden! Or about $1 worth, I guess.

Serves: However many people 18 meatballs serves. What else are they eating?