I did not know it was going to become a metaphor, so I did not take its picture while it was still whole. I bought it on a rainy cold day when, by grace of a morning dentist appointment, I had the morning off from work and thus the opportunity to go into the organic grocery store on a weekday morning when the shelves and bins were full and the checkout lines were short. I bought a lot of good stuff, including the squash.Butternut squashes, in my experience, are hard to penetrate. The last one I wanted to cook refused my efforts with one knife and bent another one; I had to ask my more muscular husband to hack it up for me. So this time I consulted all of the cookbooks on my shelf before approaching the vegetable. The consensus was: prepare the squash by peeling away the hard outside part first, then cut. This approach worked and I created from it a pile of hard, brilliant orange cubes.
Now my squash was accessible, but still not eatable. I was deeply drawn to a Molly Katzen recipe for roast squash, but it called for roasted walnut oil and pomegranate seeds, exotic ingredients not usually found in my house. I put the squash cubes away in the refrigerator.
After a week in which I went to three stores, failed to find any kind of walnut oil, and came to realize that I did not know how to choose a ripe pomegranate, I just threw some of the squash cubes into a pot of channa dal on the stove. I imagined that they would look good in the finished dish.
When the dinner had cooked long enough I lifted the lid of the pot and saw-- no pieces of squash at all. But their sweetness was throughout the meal.
