What a crazy year. One week you’re blogging about how hot and dry it is, and the next week you are handing out winter squash and cool as a cucumber. The thing that amazes me is that not one single meteorologist saw this coming so quick. Shows how hard the weather is to predict. Must be the butterfly effect.

Well as I said, I am writing about winter squash. This year’s crop is a long story that will be shortened to say that we spent a lot of time and effort on it, and it performed beautifully for a long time, but bugs and heat finally got the best of it just as the fruits began to ripen.

In order to salvage this wonderful flush of fruit we picked it a little younger than we would have liked. So that means you should eat the winter squash within a week or so. You can store it in the fridge without a bag for a week to 10 days.

Our recipe suggestion follows below. In using whatever we had at hand we found butternut squash, onions, garlic, beets, hot peppers and sage. We figure it is possible that you have a few ingredients in the back of the fridge that will compliment this recipe and we hope you search them out. Otherwise you could wait til next week as we should have beet readily available.

You can clean the butternut squash by cutting off the top and bottom and then cutting it from top to bottom and scooping out the seeds. The skin is edible, but if you want you can peel it off with a vegetable peeler.

Roasted Fresh Butternut Squash

Ingredients
1/2 large butternut squash, peeled and cubed
3 medium onions, 3 medium carrots, and 3 medium beets cut into bite-sized chunks
6 to 8 sage leaves, chopped fine
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 hot peppers, chopped
marinade:
1/4 cup extra virgin oil oil
1/8 cup balsamic vinegar
1-1/2 tsp salt
cracked pepper to taste

Method
 Preheat oven to 425 deg F.
Mix the marinade with the squash, onions, carrots, sage and beets and let set 15 minutes.
Place the vegetables in a roasting pan and roast for 30 minutes
Add garlic and hot peppers, stir and roast for 10 minutes more, or until desired tenderness.
Garnish with parsley, thyme or summer savory and a little sour cream or yogurt.