What to Do With A Butternut Squash

We were gifted with a large butternut squash the other day, and as the giver of said squash would demand to know when and in what form it was eaten, and my family isn't really too keen on just roasted butternut, I knew I had to do something. Thank goodness for the wonder that is the Internet.

Now, this butternut was a big boy, so big that I was going to have to come up with a few different recipes. The first thing I made were butternut squash and black bean burritos. They were good. So good, in fact, that I didn't even have time to grab my camera before they were disappearing into hungry bellies. I followed the original recipe pretty faithfully, but there's room to play around depending on your personal tastes and what's in your fridge at the time. For example,

• We didn't have the red pepper that was called for, but the green and yellow peppers on hand did just fine. 
• I took the time to make the black beans from scratch, half because I like the taste a little better and half because I had a bag that had been sitting around for a while and wanted to be put to good use (I could tell). Because I made a whole bag, instead of using one can, I was also able to stretch the mix to make more burritos.
• The original recipe is vegan, but none of us have any particular qualm about animal products and I had a half-used bag of cotija cheese in the fridge. Cheese of some sort definitely adds to the flavor, so use whatever you've got.
• My mom isn't too big on spicy foods, so I omitted the cayenne pepper, which left the mix a little sweeter, if you like that sort of thing.

Layered on a bed of romaine and sliced tomatoes, these were delicious. And the mix keeps well - I ate it cold with lettuce the next day at work, and it was just as good. And it's not difficult at all, only a little time-consuming (roasting the squash takes between 45 minutes to an hour depending on the size and your oven).

But as good as the burritos were (and as many people as they fed - eight, three of whom were 20-something boys), they only used up half of the my squash. I try to avoid making dinners that feature the same taste/item more than once in any given week, so onto dessert it was!

I like using my ramekins, since I think they're oh so cute, so steamed butternut squash pudding sounded like just the ticket. I was even better at being faithful to this recipe, except for three little things. I cut the sugar to 3/4 of a cup, I omitted the ginger and doubled the cinnamon (on the basis of I didn't have ginger and I did have cinnamon), and since I was hampered by the number of ramekins we own, I made six puddings instead of 12.

Fresh right out of the oven

The recipe says these take 22 minutes to bake at 325 degrees, but they took me about an hour and ten minutes at 350. It could be that I was effectively doubling the amount of batter in each ramekin, but other reviews said they had the same trouble vis a vis baking time, so I wasn't too worried.

These were great. Served with homemade vanilla whipped cream (much quicker to make than a sabayon), they made a great dessert, and were just as good cold the next day for breakfast. Hey, if we can eat muffins in the morning, why not butternut puddings, right?