 Corey Reisler, our sheriff, is my sous chef today. So let's see if I can give him orders. We'll try that. And Chad's visiting us today. You've seen him many times helping with a cooking class. So he decided to just come in and check with a cooking class again. And then. I'm making sure that Corey's doing a good job. I heard that Chad was a good sous chef. Yeah, that's right. And in January, the last Friday in January, I do not know the food, but Adam Payne from the county will come and be the sous chef. So that'll be nice. Look at all these volunteers. Terry Snow, Francoise Pitzner, Judy Clark, Peggy Watson, Janet Ray, Vicki Meyer. Without you, I could not do anything. Thank you so much. OK, winter squash, winter squash. It's harder than the summer squash. One of the things I want to talk to you today is how to get these squash cooked. Do not use a knife or an axe. Oh, God, no. This one is a giant acorn squash, light flesh. This one is our spaghetti squash. We know that one. Turban, beautiful. This one is called something else, delicata. And it's OK. Butternut is very dark and tasty. And then this one is my favorite, buttercup, with this bulb on the end. Now, the grocery stores are calling this one buttercup. And it's almost the same, except this one is drier. So it soaks up lots more butter and cream. And we know butter is good, right? Oh, God, yes, yes. OK, how do you do those? Well, you put them in the oven until they're like this, rip it open with your hands or a little knife. I don't. So far, it hasn't. And then, till done, I don't know, 300 for an hour, 325 for four. Until you can poke it with a fork easily. And so here, I've picked out all of the seeds. So that takes care of the butternut. I'm not cleaning it out carefully, but that's an easy, safe way. How about this little acorn? Cut it in half, OK, or bake it until it's soft. Easily cut it with a little paring knife. Rip it open. Take out the seeds. Marilyn, are the seeds anything like a pumpkin seed, or is that something that you really couldn't utilize? I don't know. Has anybody roasted, yes? Squash, are you good? Yeah, a little smaller. A little smaller. Spaghetti squash, baked until it's soft. It's a lot easier. And it really doesn't matter if you're burning the outside because you just utilize the inside. OK, pull out the guts, which is easy to do when they're cooked. But sometimes you know spaghetti squash. The seeds kind of go into the flesh quite a bit. There's a lot of seeds in spaghetti squash. But this is an easy way and a safe way. Now, you don't get chunks. That's true. And then, of course, you've got spaghetti. Yep, that is good. Now, it's delicious squash, which I think tastes wonderful with brown butter. Now, if people put spaghetti sauce on it, they're going to be disappointed. It does not taste like spaghetti. OK, these can go into the kitchen. This week when I did the big pot of winter squash soup, I probably had 10, 12 winter squash, different varieties. Well, I just put in two or three one afternoon bacon until the evening, put in some more, put in the next day, rip them apart, and put them into the pot. The pot is very heavy, isn't it? It's not for my good looks. Now, who made the pickles? Corey? So tell us about the pickles. So the pickles are my grandmother's recipe. So one day last year, I think I made my first batch with my mom. And she passed it down to me. And this year, I made 95 quarts. So we had the help of a neighbor who had some pickles that donated to us. And then we also had five bush pickle plants. Wow. I mean, familiar bush pickles are different than cucumbers. So bush pickles only really grow around bush. They do vine out. But you know how sometimes those cucumbers can go for miles? Oh, yeah. These don't. But it's still a cucumber. It's still a cucumber, but it's a bush pickle. So they really don't get as big. When they get too big or a cucumber, you can still utilize. When the bush pickles get too big, they're really not of any value to it. They get ugly. So we do that. And we do a lot of onions in there. And if you've had a chance to taste the onions, are to die for. Just a jar of pickled onions. Exactly, exactly. So some of those we do just a lot of onions. We do some two quart jars for bigger events for when I come and volunteer my time here. Otherwise, we do mostly a lot of quarts. But this year I started doing pints. And the neat thing about pints is when you're eating them today, they're warm and they're fresh and they're just right out of the jar. When you put them in the refrigerator, they start to get a little cooler and stuff like that. They're still good, but it's that fresh pickle, right? The first time you open it. So if you do pints, you just do more time to get to open that fresh pickle. And you can eat a pint out of crack. Oh, exactly. Somebody I know could eat a quart of that. And they're very simple. We do not do any water bathing, any of that fun stuff. We put our jars in the dishwasher, sterilize them, bring them out, have our pickles all cut, our onions all cut, our dill ready to go. Shove them and stuff them in as much as you can. And from there, we add our brine, basically a 14 to 6 ratio with vinegar to water. Now, we put a cup of big link salt in the brine. It will make 11 quarts. And from there, when we're done, we obviously boil our lids, put our lid on, seal it tight, and we put it in the oven at 300 for about 15 to 20 minutes. You notice how they look a nice yellow and they're not fresh green? You can start to see that color change when they're getting about that 15 minute. So if they're still really green, like these are our bigger ones, so these may be going for 25 minutes. When you start to see that color change coming, then you know you're good to go. The only thing about doing these compared to water bathing is obviously it's a lot easier. But for these, it may take a little longer to seal than what a water bathing does. Sometimes when you water bath and you bring them out, it's like minutes in your pocket. Oh, yeah, they click as it, yeah. These will take up to around 12 hours sometimes to actually dry them. So don't get frustrated like my mother does. She starts complaining the first batch that we're not doing this anymore because they didn't seal. And 12 hours later, you come back and they've all sealed. So I don't think I've had any in the 120-some course that I've done in the last two years that haven't sealed. And if one doesn't seal, just keep it in the fridge for a couple of weeks and eat it. Put it in the refrigerator for a month, bring it out, eat it, and it'll be great. The other thing you'll notice with these compared to the water bathing is, as Marilyn pointed out, these will stay crunchy. The water bath, they seem to get a little weak and not so crunchy. These will stay crunchy. I have friends that will not eat them for a year. They eat last year's this year, and they'll take the ones that we made in July and August and do those next year. So they last for a long period of time. Put them in the basement on a shelf. Oh, gosh, yes. I think I told you the story about my mother's friend Ivan when he was a kid in Eau Claire with all the kids, and they rented a farm in the summer because there were six or eight kids. So the guy worked at Gillette Rubber. But in the summer, they rented a farm and had lots of things to grow. And the mother canned and canned and canned all summer, about 800 quarts of all sorts of things. But then the children could take a job, anything they wanted at any time to eat. And I do the same with our salsa. We put them in the oven to stew them. And also, then we get a lot of tomato juice and stuff after we're taking all the remnants from the salsa, which is great to do too. A little trick on those that I like to do for my tomatoes when I'm cooking them either to stew them or to do the salsa is cutting them in half once they're plenty ripe, taking that small little core out of the bottom, taking as many seeds as you can get, and setting them in the oven on a cookie sheet and broil them for five minutes. Then you can take a fork and just peel that top layer of skin right off. Don't just start it, though. Throw it in with your remnants. Take all your remnants at the end. Put them in basically a cake pan. Broil that for another 10 minutes. Put it into the big cone-shaped thing that your mother always had. And we went from the first batch of salsa that my wife made to probably a half a garbage bag of remnants to a ball about this big. Oh, great. Because you took all the juice out of all that remnants, and then we made juice, and we put those in the oven and sealed those as well. And then the pigs did not get much to eat. Did not get much to eat, but the neat thing, I guess, I'll comment about the cannon. And Shad and I are prime examples of this is not something that's going away. This is something that is younger generations doing too. It's not just generations where things, you know, I'll start to fall off, people don't do anymore, like manners, you know. But some of the cannon are prime examples of that, that we see the value of this, and we see the fun. And for me, obviously, with everything that's going on this year, they're great stress relief. Oh, gosh, yes. Great time to spend with my mom and go through and do those things with her, and really having that ability to pass on that family recipe. We have our recipe, on with the recipe, the recipes. Let's start with Fideo. Now, you knew you were doing winter squash, and we're doing winter squash soup. But Fideo is a Spanish, Mexican dish. And Fideo, as far as, according to my husband, means noodle. So you all know rice errone. San Francisco treat in the little box. But that's the little noodles and the rice. This is simply the rice. Sorry, the noodles. I have melted here some butter. Let's put in a little olive oil. Carefully measured, of course. You know how we carefully measure. Let's get that heat up there. And what I'm going to do is saute the noodles until they're brown. If you were doing rice, you would saute the raw rice until it was brown. But as soon as it's brown, then put the liquid on right away so it's not black. I think there's a scissors here. Noodles go in, give it a stir. And we'll just let this cook while I'm talking. I'm going to add to it onion. And the reason I have this onion is a green onion is because Chad sometimes gives me little vegetables. He's not going to use so I use that. And the yellow pepper, too. Oh, I did want to thank Chad's sister-in-law from Chippewa Falls, visiting in Sheboygan, went to a farm. And I said to her, if you can find any interesting squash, would you get those? Because I couldn't find the turbans. And I couldn't find the Hubbard's. Well, she came back with all of this and would accept no money for it whatsoever. So these all came from Chad's sister-in-law. So thank you, Chippewa Falls. Everybody working together. But remember, it's Chad's basement and Corey's basement that's got the food. We're going to run back and forth between each other's houses and we live on the same street. That's right. On the north side of Sheboygan, yes. It's starting to get a little bit golden. You can tell by the mirror here. Now, in the squash soup that I'll bring out, you'll see it's a lot of soup, I used all of that stock. I made all that stock from last month. I probably used six quarts in with the soup. I'm going to use some of the stock here today. And cooking at home, I have no stock left from that giant kettle that we did last time. It's starting to get a little golden. Let's get it a bit browner. Can you see some of the brownness in there? That's called flavor. That's called flavor, yes. OK, now, before it burns, you want to put in the onions, I'll put in the stock, and the magic tomato sauce. To make chili con queso, melt cheese with a can of rotel or tomatoes. But I like to use that rotel. I learned about it when I lived in Texas for two or three years, when I met Lee. Marilyn, how many pickles do we put in there? As many as you'd like. Everything revolves around pickles. Yep, great. So it has broth, it has the tomato. It might need more liquid. Oh, let's put some of this in there. And there again, somebody gave this to me, and I can't remember who or why. Well, I might as well just use all of it. White zinfandel. It can be liquid. Now, I don't think it would work so well with orange juice or coffee or anything like that. But lots of liquid is needed. Now, turn this so it cooks. It has to cook the noodles until the noodles are done. Will it take 10 minutes? Will it take 20 minutes? Depends upon the temperature of your stove and your skillet and so forth. But cook till done. And I did have, we've got this one, or I think better, this one upside down. And if it hits the floor, the sheriff knows how to find it. Any questions about the fideal? Then if you look at the pumpkin bars, back in that corner is three trays of bars. One are pumpkin bars, one squash bars, one sweet potato bars. Take one of each and see if you can even tell the difference. So any questions about the squash bars, sweet potato bars, pumpkin bars? A little bit of butter, a little bit of olive oil. And, Cora, I forgot to put most of the spices into that fideal. Could you take the pepper, about a pinch of sugar, some salt, and the cumin and flavor that fideal? I forgot all about it. It's a little bland with just noodles and tomato. And part of this class is me making lots of mistakes. As we do at home when we're really cooking, right? I'm making squash soup, winter squash soup. One carrot, one onion, one stalk celery I do not have. We pretend we have those here. And we're going to need some stock. Then I used all of it in the fideal. So can you get about, I don't know, this much water in the wine bottle? Oh, here's a squash. Well, he brought me the spaghetti squash. So it'll be a spaghetti squash soup. Sure. And at home, I'm more careful. Yeah, you sure that's water? I think that's all we can get out of the tap here. Oh, my gosh. So Marilyn, the neat thing about utilizing the squash like this, you can use all these different kinds to make the winter squash, as opposed to just having to have one specific kind, and really not having to waste any of the squash that you have left over, like all the stuff on the table can actually go towards that as someone want to chew. And that's kind of the neat thing about it, is same as I talked about you going to have the leftovers from the salsa and making the juice. And then using it again in chili or something that you want, or even for just tomato juice. But really the waste and not having that left over is what's really good. I had an opportunity to also grow my own dill. I had a lady call me that, so I put on Facebook, does anybody need any dill? Because I had a gazillion, right, clients in a dill with us. The little hand we did next to it. Yeah, and so there's a lady that we know, commented on Facebook that she wanted anything that I had because they used it for their fish foils. Oh, nice. They used it in a big garbage bag and put it in the fish foils in spring or winter when they're doing their fish for the... Good idea. So she thought that was a really good idea until I came over with the actual garbage bag full of dill. Because they want everything from the, like the bay sign up to just throw the whole thing in there. And I came over with a garbage bag like full of dill. That's a big bag. She didn't really know that that was going to be enough, but it was. But really just, it's all really about just utilizing what you have, not wasting, and... Do you know how to do a fish boil? Chad, do you know how to do a fish boil? I do. Aha! How about a fish boil? Right, that might be one of our... One of our things coming up sometime in use, right? Oh, it sounds good. Probably not in the winter. Yes. You put pumpkin in the oven like squash and do it the same way. Yes, I do. Correct, the whole pumpkin. No. Yeah, and I do have to put the wrap on the bottom shelf. Right, yeah, right, right, yeah. When the fire department comes, just mention their own name. Yeah, she says, fine. Let's see if we have any flavor here. There's nothing. Okay, I think I need to get some of those kitchen spices like salt at least. Oh, by the way, while you're... I made some wild rice. I had a package at home or two packages. I made a package of wild rice and cooked it in some of that stock again. So that wild rice will be at this end of the table. This will be the soup. You go down to this end and you put a little bit of the wild rice into each bowl of squashed soup. Over there will be the fedeo and that'll be the bars. That way, there's so many of us, we don't all have to get the same food at the same time. It shortens the lines. And of course, salt and a pinch of sugar, not to make it sweet, but you know the old mantra, to enhance the flavor, to bring out more flavor. And I ran out of black pepper at home so I've been using the white pepper until it's gone. And there is a difference in flavor, but I can't tell it. Okay, now let's see if we have any flavor to this thing. But it still needs a little more salt. Okay, Corey, here's another tasting spoon. Turn this baby off, see what you think. You can leave it on there, I'll... yep. And that's mostly spaghetti squash. Very good. Yeah, no without the... With enthusiasm. It was just water, no wine, no stock, you're right. Yeah, I get the non-alcoholic version, right?