Butternut Goulash

Mid-October, and the Lowcountry has begun its autumn shift — the light lower, the air cooler, the marsh grass turning gold with the slow patience of a season that does not rush. I walk to work through the historic district and the walking is different now, lighter, because the mornings no longer begin with Mama's medication and Joy's breakfast and the orchestration of two lives before I orchestrate my own. Ruth arrives at eight. I leave at eight-fifteen. The fifteen minutes between Ruth's arrival and my departure are the decompression chamber between the life inside the house and the life outside it, and the decompression is necessary, and the necessity is not weakness but arithmetic: there are only so many hours in a day, and I have been spending them all.

Carrie submitted her early decision application to Emory on Monday. The envelope — or rather, the click, the digital submission that lacks the ceremony of a sealed envelope — was the culmination of three months of writing and revising and the particular anxiety that college applications produce in high-achieving seventeen-year-olds, which is the anxiety of people who have always succeeded and who are now asking a stranger to validate the success. I told Carrie that the application was excellent. She said, "It's done," which is the only thing she wanted to hear: not that it was excellent but that it was finished, because Carrie's relationship with achievement is not about praise but about completion.

Mama had a lovely Sunday. She sat in the garden — the last warm Sunday before the cold arrives — and she named the flowers. Not in Latin, as she did in the spring, but by color: "The pink ones." "The yellow ones." "The ones that smell like church." (The ones that smell like church are gardenias, which grew outside Tabernacle Baptist and which Mama associates with Sunday mornings and Reverend James's sermons and the particular combination of holiness and humidity that defines a Lowcountry church in summer.) The naming was imprecise and beautiful, and the beauty was in the imprecision — in the gap between what the flowers are called and what they mean to a woman who has lost the names but kept the meaning.

I made squash casserole — the fall staple, yellow squash baked with onion and cheese and Ritz crackers, the dish that appears at every Southern gathering from September to November and that is both sophisticated and deeply unsophisticated, which is the Lowcountry's specialty: food that bridges the distance between the elegant and the homely without choosing a side.

That squash casserole I mentioned — it led me here, to this pot of butternut goulash, which is its deeper, more sustaining cousin: the same spirit of a fall gathering dish that doesn’t choose between elegant and humble, but the kind you make on a Tuesday when Carrie’s application is finally submitted and Mama had a good Sunday and Ruth arrived on time and the morning, for once, belonged to you. I wanted something that felt like the season — golden, unhurried, the slow patience of October — and this is it.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 50 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small butternut squash (about 2 lbs), peeled, seeded, and cut into 3/4-inch cubes
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
1 cup beef broth
1 1/2 teaspoons sweet paprika
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds (optional)
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup elbow macaroni or egg noodles, uncooked
Sour cream and fresh parsley, for serving

Instructions

Brown the beef. In a large, deep skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, cook the ground beef, breaking it up with a spoon, until browned and no longer pink, about 6–8 minutes. Drain excess fat.
Soften the aromatics. Add the diced onion to the pan and cook with the beef over medium heat until the onion is translucent, about 4 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for 1 minute more until fragrant.
Build the base. Stir in both paprikas, the caraway seeds (if using), and dried thyme, coating the meat and onion in the spices. Cook for 1 minute to bloom the spices.
Add the squash and liquids. Add the butternut squash cubes, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and beef broth. Stir to combine, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.
Simmer. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes, until the squash begins to soften.
Cook the pasta. Stir in the uncooked macaroni or egg noodles. Cover and continue simmering for 10–12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the pasta is tender and the squash is fully cooked through. Add a splash of broth if the mixture becomes too thick.
Season and serve. Taste and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Ladle into bowls and top with a dollop of sour cream and a scatter of fresh parsley.

Nutrition (per serving)

Butternut Goulash — The Casserole That Holds a Sunday Together