Recipe 4: Harissa Squash Salad

Boy, oh boy. I wanted to love this one but it was a bit more trouble than it was worth and definitely wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. Also, I will mention that I usually make notes while cooking and eating each recipe but I completely forgot for this recipe. Oopsie!

Anyway, let’s just jump into it!

The Shopping Experience

This recipe called for butternut squash, 2 avocados, mixed salad leaves, mozzarella cheese, and the bane of my existence: rose harissa.

Everything aside from the damn rose harissa was super easy to find from my local IGA grocery store. Rose harissa, for those who don’t know (I had no idea what it was until reading this recipe), is a Middle Eastern spicy chilli paste/sauce that is fragranced with rose petals. Based on looking for this paste online, it seems to be popular in Jamie’s home of the U.K. but not so much in North America/my home of Canada. Because of this, I couldn’t get my hands on it at all! All 5 grocery stores near me didn’t have anything similar and also had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them for it. I narrowed down my options for substitutions to Red pepper jam and Gochujang, a sweet and spicy Korean red chilli paste. Since jam changes consistency when it’s warmed up/cooked with, I choose the Korean chilli paste from my local Korean grocery store, Hannam.

With the problematic ingredient successfully substituted, we were ready to get to cookin’!

The Cooking Experience

Even though the recipe called for cutting the squash into 2-inch chunks but in hindsight, they were way bigger than I would have preferred. I thought about cutting them smaller than instructed but in my dedication to sharing my experience, I didn’t want to deviate too much from the actual instructions. Maybe my squash wasn’t as ripe as it should have been but my squash chucks took a much longer time to cook than the recommended time of 50 minutes. My squash took closer to 65-75 minutes to get to the desired soft texture.

It was also not until I cooked that I realized the mozzarella ball I bought was more like a fior di latte while the cheese chunks in Jamie’s picture looked like the looser texture of a bufala or burrata mozzarella ball. This little distinction between my end result and Jamie’s actually frustrated me a bit because one would assume that Jamie’s team should have specified the type of mozzarella if it changed the final outcome so much since firm vs. soft mozzarella taste not only have a very different texture but they taste super different too! But, oh well.

We also ended up having too much squash, which was totally my fault because I didn’t weigh the squash when I bought it to make sure it was the recommended size, so we had to put the rest away in a Tupperware container.

Pro-tip: if you have too much squash for the amount you want to eat right away, eat the rest of it right away because they do not keep well aka they’ll just get soggier and soggier until you can’t possibly imagine putting them in your mouth anymore and then end up throwing it away. Not based on true events...

The Eating Experience

I definitely enjoyed the more earthy ingredients mixing with the tartness of the red wine vinegar. Prior to using recipes from this cookbook, I never cooked with red wine vinegar but I’m realizing how versatile and tasty it is!

The softness of the squash, avocado, and cheese were nicely complemented by the crunch of the squash seeds. But that said, after a while, the softness of everything including the salad leaves gets to be a little too much as the mouth-feel is pure mushiness.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, both my boyfriend and I weren’t huge fans of the overall mushiness so it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be making this one again any time soon. If I do make this again, I would love to try it again with a different type of mozzarella cheese to see if it improves the taste and texture of the dish.

This salad was still not bad but definitely not my favourite so far!

Total estimated cook time: Prep 10 min, Cook 50 min.
Total actual cook time: 1 hour and 47 min. (I don’t know what happened to take this long)