The only place I’ve seen squashes be on the menu commonly is in France. I’m curious if other Europeans frequently eat squashes or if this is more of a North/South American thing?
In the US we frequently eat yellow squash and zucchini year round and during the fall it’s common to eat butternut, spaghetti, acorn, pattypan (less often) squashes and pumpkin (most people carve them but pumpkin purée is used in a lot of fall cooking).
If you don’t eat these do you have a similar kind of seasonal produce that you look forward to eating in the fall?
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I rarely eat any vegetables. I’ve seen squash prepared by putting ground meat inside in place of the seeds. Sweet round orange pumpkin can be grated and added to pancakes.
In winter and fall (when it starts getting colder and they get available basically) yeah.
I just like to cut them in cubes, sprinkle them with olive oil and herbs and bake them. They work well as gnocchis too and soup for the more soup inclined people.
~~I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in any grocery store, to be honest. So I’d have to say it’s rare here.~~
EDIT: Yeah, here in shops you can find most of all pumpkins, I think they’ve become more common in recent years.
Courgettes (you call them zucchini) are available in shops year round, and you occasionally see butternut squash in the shops though it’s not as popular—butternut squash soup is the usual dish.
Butternut squash is very commonly eaten in autumn/winter soups in the UK, but you don’t get the same kind of variety of squashes that you’d get in the US or even France as you say (and we don’t have a ton of distinct words for different kinds of squash like *potiron*, *potimarron* etc either), nor do we go in on everything pumpkin in autumn like they do in the US. The problem is that a lot of squashes are a giant pain in the arse to prepare and there are fewer things I like doing less than peeling a butternut squash or scraping flesh out of a pumpkin.
On a side note, even if they are technically squashes, I don’t think we’d think of courgettes (what you’d call zucchinis) or marrows as squashes, they’re in a separate class of vegetable.
And also, for us “squash” is typically a kind of highly concentrated fruit juice that you drink heavily diluted.
In Poland we eat zucchini very often (green and yellow). Pattinsons can be also found, but are mainly used for pickling or decoration. Pumpkin too — especially the hokkaido variety.
Yes, during the season since then it’s the best. Usually late autumn/winter time.
I grow a lot of Hokkaido pumpkins that I cook with so that’s probably my #1 squash I eat
Small pumpkins, butternuts in autumn. Zucchini in summer and spring (but in this day and age all year round)
You can buy pumpkins in almost all supermarkets in Germany in autumn and winter.
I mainly buy Hokkaido pumpkins, I think in English the name is red kuri squash, because you can eat the peel with them and so don’t have to peel them.
I mainly cook soup with them, either with apples or with ginger, chilli, carrots and coconut milk, plus prawns.
Yes. Basically every day. Not because I like it but my son loves it and we try to all eat the same food.
Zucchinis are eaten all year long. Either grilled or as a hash brown, etc. . And in fall, we eat other type of squashes. We mostly make soup. But also we like to make strudels out of them. There is even a squash/pumpkin festival at the start of October.
Of course, pumpkins and courgettes are consumed regularly, especially in their season, but they can always be found. In my region, then, there are many recipes that have them as a base.
In winter yes. They’re also extremely easy to grow yourself.
Zucchini and hokkaido pumpkins are quite commonly available in the stores, but we don’t eat them too frequently. And it’s even less common to find them in restaurant menus, except possibly pumpkin creamy soup.
Around this time of year I often make pumpkin soup and other dishes. Butternut squash is usually readily available and eaten too. But otherwise, squash isn’t massively common.
My language doesn’t make a difference between squashes and pumpbins, so I don’t really know.
We eat zucchetti / zucchini almost all year round, imported from Italy or Spain. Pumpkins (incl. squashes) are an autumn thing. In my household, we seem to hav them every other week. Pumpkin soup is very good.
> zucchini year round
We eat them in summer/autumn from our garden. We have so much of them, that we regularly feed them to our chickens.
> seasonal produce that you look forward to eating in the fall?
Absolutely, [pickled gherkins](https://www.rezeptteufel.de/wp-content/uploads/gewuerzgurken.jpg). (Or cucumbers, don’t know what you call them in English.)
It’s a lot of work to make them, but they taste so great 😀
Squash and pumpkin pretty much never. They are even rare in stores. But zucchinis and courgettes and such are very common in summer.
I made pumpkin soup last night, with pumpkins from my garden. We eat so many vegetables year round. In the autumn we go to the forest to find mushrooms. We also have logs in the garden with shiitake growing each year. We do not use pumpkin puree often though.
Since I’ve been alive, absoutely. Butternut, hokaido, multiple varieties of courgettes. They are easy to grow in the garden and often plentiful in July and August to the point of being hard to use.
Pumpinks never really took off that I’d know about. Traditionally they were grown for the seeds to make oil from, while the flesh was given to pigs.
Butternut squash and zucchini are certainly for sale in the UK and in Norway, and every autumn there are pumpkins and small gourds for sale.
There is less of a selection, but they are part of people’s diets in Northern Europe.
Squash and pumpkins aren’t represented in the traditional Norwegian cuisine. We eat other vegetables of roots grown in the ground like carrots, turnips, parsnips and celery particularly during the autumn. People will certainly eat squash and pumpkin, but there’s no strong tradition eating it here.
At the moment, yes. I grow them too. I got a lot of zucchini this year but not a single butternut squash unfortunately. Despite having several big plants, no butternuts grew. We had a cold June followed by an arid July so I guess that contributed somehow.
Had never had any until I went to the US. You can get some here, but not the variety y’all have and besides making soup I wouldn’t really know what to do with one.
I used too, then I moved away from squash growing mother, I moved so far away she cant give me some. Best thing I ever did, Squash 6 days a week during summer and early autumn can make any one dislike it.
Italy is extremely passionate about pumpkin and Zucchini, they even fry the flowers of zucchini.
In Northern Europe pumpkins have gotten more and more prevalent for winter dishes, but most people will use them only for soups or stews.