Hi,

Yesterday a good customer stopped at the stand in the late afternoon with his wife. It was one of those rare days where I was at the stand alone helping customers. The couple put quite a few items, including a Heart Of Gold Winter Squash, on the counter. The husband pointed to the Heart Of Gold squash and commented while he was looking at me, "That is a good squash!" We have grown this squash for a couple of years and its sales have started to take off. While we have eaten this squash before, we decided to have a baked Heart Of Gold squash dinner--that's all we ate. We were all really impressed with its taste. First off, it is obviously loaded with sugar since the aluminum foil, which we lined the cookie sheet we used to bake them on, had the dark burnt residue of sugar that oozed out of the squash. We usually only see this burnt sugar on the foil when we have baked Buttercup squash and sweet potatoes. The very fine textured cooked squash had a refreshing taste that was familiar to me but I couldn't first off think what it reminded me of. While the squash was obviously exceptionally sweet, it had a mild refreshing flavor. After thinking about it for a while, I believe the best way of describing it was that the flesh had flavor that reminded one of three foods--squash (obviously), potato and also sweet corn. Of course when you put all those tastes together there is a new taste--the Heart Of Gold taste! We ate it with butter and salt. Because of its sweetness, I do not recommend adding any type of sugar.

The Heart Of Gold squash is basically a hybrid Sweet Dumpling Squash. It has a distinct advantage over Sweet Dumpling -- it is larger. It is heart shaped (like the acorn squash) with creamy white, dark green, mottled striping. The flesh is thick, orange and fine grained. Its flavor is also quite similar to Delicata, which is also known as the Sweet Potato Squash. Another good feature of this squash is that it is an excellent keeper. It is claimed it will keep to March under the right conditions (55F- 60F and dry with good air circulation). However, I wouldn't try to keep it past Christmas. We have a good crop of this squash, most of which is still in the field to be harvested.

I plan on making a video about this squash including how to prepare it and cook it. Since the editing takes a bit of time, the video probably won't be complete until next week.

Nashle,

Tom