I'll draw two things tomorrow because I'm tired today and wanted to do this instead. I spent most of yesterday making things to eat, and for some reason, decided to share them with you. They are both delicious AND healthy!
Today's contenders: a butternut squash and an acorn squash. Squash of all kinds is delicious, but it can be a pain in the ass to cook. Most recipes that use them tell you to peel it and chop it up and THEN bake it. Those recipes are full of shit and apparently assume you own a goddamn chainsaw. I peeled and cubed a raw squash once in my life, and I'm never doing it again. So today I am going to share with you how to make it a lot easier to get that yummy and healthy squash onto your dinner plate!
I have no tips for picking out a decent acorn squash, because they all look the same: green and kind of orangey. As for the butternut squash, you'll get the most flesh out of the ones with the thicker column, not base. The base is where the seeds are, so it's mostly hollow. Feel free to giggle inappropriately while picking one out like I do.
STEP 1: After picking out your silly looking squash, PREHEAT your oven to 400 degrees F.
STEP 2: put some holes in that sucker! The knife should go right through the base, but where my knife is sticking out is where it's pure flesh. Give it a dozen or so stabs and you're golden. Do the same with the acorn squash.
STEP 3: Put about a cup of water in the bottom of a glass dish (9x13" shown here), then put the squash in as well. This keeps it from shriveling up too much.
STEP 4: Slide it in the oven, and cook for 1 hour!
Alright! It's been an hour, so how are we looking? Delicious, that's how.
STEP 5: Remove from oven, and let cool for a few minutes. Or just dive right into slicing it open in a technique I like to call Burn the Shit Out of Your Fingers for Food. Don't turn the oven off yet! You'll still need it pipin' hot for a few minutes yet.
Much like testing a cake to see if it's done, poke your knife in again. It should slide right through the skin and the flesh with little to no resistance. If it still seems too tough to slice through, pop it back in the oven for about ten minutes. Repeat as necessary! This blurry photo brought to you by Kitchen Aid.
STEP 6: Slice that bad boy in half! My, it looks kind of like a pumpkin, doesn't it? That's because a pumpkin IS a squash! Use a spoon to scoop out the seeds and the stringy stuff. Then peel the skin off with a knife. I do this at the same time as I cube the thing, because the skin doesn't always want to let go of the flesh. Let it cool if you want, but it's better to be awesome like me and continue to burn the shit out my hands in the name of something delicious. Place the cubes on a baking sheet. I typically cover it in tinfoil for an easy clean up.
STEP 7: All chopped up? Great! Now coat the cubes in either butter or olive oil. Leave it at that, or sprinkle with your favorite spice/herb/whatever.
I dump about five pounds of cinnamon into everything I make, so that's what I seasoned with here.
STEP 8: Pop the baking sheet with the delicious little squash morsels back into the oven for another ten minutes. Remove from the oven, let them cool for a few minutes, then devour them. You might have some left over to store in the fridge, but probably not.
The butternut squash mysteriously vanished halfway through this because I was using it to make another dish. Follow the same basic instructions to get the same results as the acorn squash.
NEXT TIME: I will show you how to make homemade vegetable stock! It is superior in every way to the store bought stuff. Most notably the sodium won't be 800%. After that, I will then use previously made vegetable stock to make Squash and Lentil soup, my favorite winter/cold-weather-sucks dish.