November 8, 2026

The miso came off the spoon in a slow ribbon, and the smell when it hit the butter was nutty and salt-sweet, almost like roasted peanuts before it shifted into something deeper and older.

I'd picked up half a kabocha at the Tanaka stall on Saturday — they'd had three left, all dark-skinned and heavy for their size. I took the smallest one and let it sit on the counter until this morning. November kabocha has a dryness to the flesh that summer squash doesn't. It holds its shape when you cook it and turns almost chestnut-sweet toward the edges.

The glaze was white miso thinned with sake and a little mirin, finished with cold butter off the heat. What I hadn't accounted for was the left side of the burner running ahead again. The pan tilted that direction, and two wedges took on more colour than I'd planned — a dark mahogany band along one edge, bitter at the very tip. I ate those first. The bitterness against the kabocha's sweetness was not a bad accident. My grandmother would have called it yakimono no hana — the flower of the char — which I think she invented to make me feel better about burned edges, but I've come to believe her.

The rest of the wedges held their pale orange insides, soft under the tooth in the way that gives without collapsing, the miso clinging to the cut sides and going slightly chewy where it had reduced.

I ate it with short-grain rice and a few leaves of mizuna from the bag I'd grabbed at Uwajimaya on the way home. The mizuna had a faint mustard bite that cut through the butter cleanly. No leftovers. That's the point of cooking for one on a wet Monday in November.

#homecooking #seasonal #kitchenjournal #wintersquash