Butternut Squash and Pomegranate Salad

This is a wonderful dish to serve in autumn, when gourd and pomegranate are in season. I developed this dish for Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year. Like many Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from around the globe, I preserve the 2000-year-old tradition of serving and blessing an array of ceremonial foods at the Rosh Hashannah Seder, which is called Yehi Ratzon, or May It Be, Seder. The blessing for each of the ceremonial foods bejeweling the table is an expression of a wish for the New Year. Gourd symbolizes a wish for happiness. My late mother, a Yemenite Jew, boiled chunks of pumpkin in salt water. It was simply prepared, but we loved it! My butternut squash dish incorporates two other Rosh Hashannah ceremonial foods -- pomegranates and honey, a wish for good deeds and a wish for sweetness, respectively. Other ceremonial foods include dates (peace), apple in honey (sweetness), green beans or black-eyed pea (prosperity), beets (freedom), leeks (friendships) and meat from the head of a lamb or, for vegetarians, a head of lettuce (leadership). It is the custom to serve these ceremonial foods family-style in small bowls to be passed around the table for guests to share after each blessing is recited. I serve samples of each food in individual salad plates and call it a first course. After you go through this plate you can forgo serving a salad course. We place the individual plate on the table for the participants just before the guests arrive. The colorful richness of the season’s bounty sparkles on the festive holiday table, making it extra special for the coming New Year. Add this salad to cooked quinoa or buckwheat groats (kasha) to serve in any automn luncheon or dinner buffet. May we all be blessed with sweetness, prosperity, peace, freedom and friendship always.