Bake Me A Cake

There's a big music festival coming up, and the local Obama group is doing a fund-raising bake sale as part of it. So I'm baking - and trying to work my way through the vast quantity of vegetables that's taking over my kitchen.

One strange quirk of my apartment is the squash in the compost heap. About every other year, we get squash - different kinds of squash - squash we never bought. I don't know if they're from a neighbor's compost, or if they just turn up. Two years ago it was giant spaghetti squash. This year, I found acorn squash in the blackberry patch.

And then there are these. The thing that looks like an alien mothership is a pattypan squash - a really big pattypan squash. (The shuttlecraft tomatoes are all from the Cooleys.) I was feeling determined to use them, so I thought I'd combine the squash surplus with the bake sale, and help the Obama campaign while being a good locavore.

I wound up with this - Patty Cakes. I wound up with this after hours of work, a lot of cursing, and a pile of dirty dishes that I still haven't cleared. Grating this squash is a lot harder than it sounds - simply cutting this squash required my biggest knife and all the strength I could muster. There's not much to it besides skin and seeds - the giant squash yielded just two cups of grated flesh.

I'm not even sure if the cakes are good. They're ok. They're so moist that they have to be refrigerated, and can't be frosted, which doesn't really make them good bake sale material. I'll just have to hope the cute name is attractive.

Perhaps this should have been my clue that this was a bad idea. Notice how the squash plant has been dragged away? Notice how the squash has been tasted and abandoned?

I don't know who gave the squash a bad review. I haven't seen many raccoons here. It's too big for a squirrel.

I wonder if it was this guy?

He turned up in the back yard yesterday. I've heard coyotes before, but never seen one in person.

Isn't he coyote adorable? It was all I could do not to adopt him. I'm not sure the dogs would have minded - they bark at the squirrels a lot more than they did at him. And if he's willing to eat the darned squash, he's welcome to hang around.