Raw butternut squash? Really?

I know: what a surprise. It’s good. Think carrots. Orange, shredded in slaws, or added to a green salad, or shredded or shaved as a stand-alone salad. Like carrots, you certainly can cook the squash and then eat it at room temperature with other salad-like ingredients like raw red pepper or celery, or onion, and tossed with salad dressing. Of course, eaten raw more of squash’s nutrients are intact, but I’ll confess, growing up, butternut and other winter squashes were strictly cooked food and I never questioned that.

Over the weekend, though, with one anxious eye on the squash supply motivating me to be more open-minded about how to prepare winter squash, I thought, what the heck, let’s give it a try. After all, how much steamed, roasted, sautéed, stuffed and baked squash, squash soup, latkes, and squash casseroles can I foist off on the household? The squash-a-day plan I had going here was tolerated but not that popular.

Shaved butternut squash before I added the dressing.

Using a vegetable peeler, all I did was shave squash curls off into a bowl, and following Melissa Clark’s advice (in the New York Times), sprinkled it with a little lemon juice, a little olive oil, a shake of salt and some sugar, and a little black pepper. In about twenty minutes, it had softened up nicely and could be adorned with add-ins. I chopped up some scallions, added them, and added raisins, which plummeted straight to the bottom of the bowl, and had to be dug out when I served the salad. I really liked the lemon with the squash, but if a simple vinaigrette salad dressing is what you have, by all means use that—but be sparing at first. You want to soften the squash, not drown it.

We conversed here about the sinking raisins problem and concluded that something smaller and stickier, like seeds—sesame, sunflower or pumpkin—would work. If you give this a try, and there might be four or five of you who might, let me know how it goes for you.

Additionally, I am also going to try shredding squash on my grater with carrots to make a cheerful orange-colored salad, and I am going to mix shredded squashed into cabbage for a slaw variation. Meanwhile, I will content myself with a new way of using my squash supply.