And this one brings us to our last featured favorite winter squash this season! This one is very special to us and is also one of our most recent additions to our garden.
One of the things we simply cannot grow in the subarctic are sweet potatoes. Being a tropical plant, they simply take too long and require both warm soils and warm ambient air. We just don’t have the season for it up north. There’s no great “hacks” for them, either, aside from painstakingly growing them indoors.
But, we can fill that same flavor profile in our meals with certain kinds of squash!
Delicata squash, in this case, is an almost exact stand-in for sweet potato! In fact, Delicata is also sometimes called Sweet Potato Squash! Acorn squash, like we featured previously, are also very close in flavor as well. Short of sweet potato fries, these squash can often be like-for-like substituted into your dishes!
We have found Delicata to be somewhat variable in our gardens from season to season. While it always produces, and is a winner for its flavor, it definitely prefers those warmer seasons. Cooler summers still bring us squash, they just tend to be a bit smaller. Either way, though, these squash are on the smaller side.
The more we’ve grown squash, the more we’ve found value in both diversity and growing different flavor profiles. Size isn’t everything. When you have some space, using it for quality and diverse (even perhaps, small) squash is a great trade off. Delicata fits that bill for us.
Just recently, we made a wonderful stuffing to serve with our Delicata. Some nice bread, apples, our harvested carrots and celery, along with a load of “fall spices” made for a wonderful and hearty winter meal. The sweet potato flavor from the squash brought it all together, like a mini Thanksgiving!
So, those are our favorites! We do grow quite a few other winter squash varieties. Just because they didn’t make the “favorites” cut doesn’t mean we don’t also enjoy them. Winter squash serve several important roles in our food production efforts!
We’ve had some fun sharing our favorite winter squash with you this season. Hope you’ve enjoyed them! We still have more to share with all of you this winter, but we wanted to make sure we fulfilled this promise from the growing season!
