Jeanne Douillard of Greenfield has had a variety of careers. None of them has involved cooking, although she has cooked since she was very young.
Pottery is her most important vocation but far from the only one. “I’ve been a medical technologist. I also have worked as a financial analyst. I have been a teacher,” she told me last week. She has also run a health food store, she added.
“I’ve done a lot of different things that don’t seem to be connected, but they’re actually pretty good together,” she asserted.
Douillard loves her work as a potter and enjoys the arts in general. For a number of years, she owned a gallery in North Carolina that highlighted local arts and crafts. She appreciated the way this enterprise supported the community.
Douillard noted that although she could keep making pots for the rest of her life, she is finding traveling (and lugging her wares) to craft shows more difficult as she ages. Luckily, she has found another passion that is keeping her busy: writing.
She enjoys all sorts of writing, particularly essays and poetry. In recent years, her major focus has been an exploration of her own French and Canadian roots, and of the French presence as a whole in New England.
Her book, “I Remember/Je Me Souviens,” explores important questions of personal and cultural identity. She is in the process of revising the book, which came out in 2016.
When circumstances permit it, she gives talks about her research to interested groups. “I want to go through New England, telling this story,” she smiled. She explained that she relishes her personal interaction with the people with whom she shares her stories.
Personal interaction is in fact her favorite thing about cooking as well … and perhaps about life. Douillard and her husband, Armand Proulx, are among the most outgoing, interesting people I know in our area. They can offer smiles and stories galore.
Douillard likes to cook for people, although she hesitates to call herself a master cook. That title, she told me, goes to her daughter, Rachelle Douillard-Proulx. “It’s amazing to watch her. I don’t know where she got this,” Douillard said with a laugh. “Not from me. Not from my mother.”
Despite her modesty about her cooking, working in the kitchen enables Douillard to entertain friends … and to share the gifts of her garden. “I’m a big gardener,” she confessed.
She is a huge fan of butternut squash, so when I put out a call for recipes using that fall vegetable on Facebook recently, she immediately volunteered to make her favorite squash lasagna. It gets additional color, nutrition and flavor from another cool-weather vegetable: spinach.
The germ of the recipe was an online formula discovered by Rachelle Douillard-Proulx. Both mother and daughter have adapted it, however. It took them a while to get the recipe just right.
They had to figure out the most flavorful cooking method for both the butternut squash and the spinach.
They also experimented with different lasagna noodles, finally deciding that they prefer the no-boil type. These noodles tend to absorb the excess vegetable liquid. “There’s a lot of water in butternut squash,” Douillard sighed.
The result is a hearty vegetarian dish that could grace any holiday table.
Ingredients for the butternut squash filling:
4 cups butternut squash puree (from about 2 medium squash)
1 cup ricotta cheese
½ cup milk plus more if needed
⅜ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
For the spinach filling:
8 ounces spinach
1 cup ricotta
1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded
2 garlic cloves, minced
¼ teaspoon salt
Pepper to taste
For assembly:
10 ounces lasagna noodles, cooked (for gluten-free eaters, Douillard suggests using Tinkyada brown-rice lasagna noodles), or uncooked no-boil noodles
1½ cups mozzarella cheese, shredded or more (Douillard likes to substitute finely shredded cheddar for the part of this cheese that goes on top of the lasagna.)
½ cup Parmesan cheese
¼ teaspoon Italian seasoning
¼ teaspoon paprika or smoked paprika
¼ teaspoon basil
To prepare the butternut squash, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Start with two medium squashes. Slice off the ends. Cut the squash in half, and scrape out all the seeds. Place the squash in a baking pan, cut sides down.
Pour in water to fill the bottom of the pan, and bake the squash for 1½ hours. Scrape the cooked squash out of the peel.
Using an immersion blender and a large bowl or pan, combine 4 cups of butternut squash puree with the remaining ingredients for the squash filling. Add more milk if needed; the filling should be very creamy. Mix very well. Taste and add more salt, if needed.
To prepare the spinach, bring a small amount of water to a boil, add the spinach and steam it lightly for two minutes. Remove the spinach from the pot and combine it with the other spinach-filling ingredients. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if needed.
To make the lasagna, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Spread one-third of the squash filling on the bottom of a casserole dish. (Douillard most recently used one that measured 11 inches by 8½ inches.) Sprinkle it lightly with mozzarella.
Top with lasagna noodles without overlapping; press down lightly if using no-boil noodles. Spread half of the spinach filling over the noodles. Top lightly with mozzarella cheese. Top with another layer of lasagna noodles.
Spread on another layer (one-third) of the butternut squash mixture, then sprinkle lightly with mozzarella cheese. Top with lasagna noodles.
Spread the remaining half of the spinach filling over the lasagna noodles. Top lightly with mozzarella cheese. Top with the final layer of lasagna noodles.
Spread the remaining squash filling over this final layer of noodles. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan and the remaining mozzarella cheese (about ½ cup of mozzarella or cheddar). Generously sprinkle the cheese with Italian seasoning, paprika and basil.
Cover the baking dish with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake for 10 more minutes. The lasagna will be easier to serve (i.e., less goopy) if you let it sit for a few minutes before serving. Serves six to eight.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.