As much as I loved the mixed green salad with candied grapefruit pops and grilled cheese croutons, we’re in the middle of a brutal winter right now and it’s time for a change. So please welcome our new Pumpkin Salad with four types of squash, toasted pepitas, pumpkin oil and a blue cheese crouton. What does that all mean? It means this:

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More pictures, and some shots of the strangest butternut squash you’ll ever see after the jump.

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The first question people want to know about this dish: is there bacon in it? No,  because I don’t cook bacon here. What is in it is butternut squash. And what do I do to it? Nothing fancy, I just smoke it until it looks like this:

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And and then I crumble it over the salad. No goop, no chemicals, no artificial flavoring, just cooking. The second question people have about this dish is: what’s a pepita? It’s a roasted pumpkin seed which is a really popular snack in Mexico. What we do to them is coat them in chickpea flour and Vadouvan and then toast them until they look like this:

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The four squash involved are delicata, kabocha, acorn squash and, of course, butternut squash.

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Then I add a grilled blue cheese crouton as a small homage to the previous salad. There’s a bit of pumpkin oil drizzled around the plate, and there you have it: a salad you actually want to eat in the middle of winter, combining smoked, grilled, toasted and roasted squash.

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