Vegetarian Roast: Stuffed Butternut Squash

Cooking a Vegetarian Roast doesn’t have to be a mind melt with my easy Roasted Butternut Squash with a tasty leek, cashew nut and blue cheese stuffing. It looks gorgeous straight from the oven plonked onto the table and served up with golden roast potatoes, lightly steamed greens and lashings of home-made onion gravy. 

I’m working with Mumsnet and Aunt Bessie’s to show you how whipping up a Vegetarian Sunday roast for the family needn’t be a big deal.

Naturally my boys won’t go anywhere near a butternut squash with “weird stuff on it” (their words not mine) so I slung a Quorn Roast in for them; but they do love all the trimmings of a roast – bread sauce, stuffing, gravy, greens, and Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puds and roast potatoes.

On a dark and wet Tuesday night, the jewel-bright butternut squash totally cheered up our kitchen table and Matthew and I got to tuck into the entire thing ourselves – it really was quite a feast!

I was super chuffed with how the stuffing turned out. Leeks are really one of the tastiest vegetables – they make the house smell wonderful when they’re cooking and give the biggest hit of flavour to recipes. I put just enough cashew nuts in for that brilliant crunch and the blue cheese melted in little golden nuggets on top of the crispy breadcrumbs.

I’m tempted to make this as a stand-alone stuffing for Christmas Day.

5 from 3 votes

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Stuffed Butternut Squash

Prep Time

10 mins

Cook Time

1 hr 10 mins

Total Time

1 hr 20 mins

 

Delicious roasted butternut squash with a crunchy stuffing of cashew nuts, leeks and blue cheese - it's a perfectly easy Vegetarian Roast Dinner centrepiece!

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: Vegetarian

Servings: 2

Author: Katie Bryson

Ingredients

• 1 medium butternut squash
• frylight/cooking oil spray
• salt and pepper
• 1 lemon juice only
• 1 clove garlic crushed
• 1 tsp dried sage

For the stuffing

• 1 leek finely chopped
• frylight/cooking oil spray
• 25 g Panko Breadcrumbs
• 25 g Cashew Nuts chopped
• 1/2 tsp dried sage
• 25 g Shropshire Blue Cheese chopped into tiny cubes

Instructions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C/180C fan/Gas 6.

2. Slice the butternut squash in half lengthways and using a spoon scoop out the seeds and stringy bits.

3. Using a sharp knife, score fairly deep criss-cross lines across the surface of each half and then spray with frylight and season with salt and pepper.

4. Mix the lemon juice with the crushed garlic and then brush it across the surface of each squash half. Pop them sliced side up on a baking sheet and roast for 60 minutes until the flesh is tender all the way through. Put it back in for another 10 minutes if it's not done - it depends how chunky your butternut squash is!

5. Meanwhile gently cook the leeks in a frying pan with some fry light and a pinch of salt until soft. Then pop into a bowl with the breadcrumbs, chopped nuts and dried sage and mix thoroughly.

6. Once the butternut squash halves are cooked, fill the scooped out part with stuffing mix and scatter any leftovers over the rest of the squash. Finally dot each half with the tiny cubes of blue cheese and pop back in the oven for 10 minutes until golden and bubbling.

7. Serve with all the usual Sunday Lunch trimmings!

So why are Aunt Bessie’s Roasties a Mum’s favourite?

• Rated by Mumsnet (tested by 250 Mumsnetters, with over 75% saying they would use it again, and most importantly, that they would recommend the product)
• Convenient – quick to make
• Maximum taste
• Gluten-free
• Vegetarian
• Low in fat at 4.5%

Feeding Boys verdict:

• Golden, crisp and tasty – the boys ADORE them
• Ready in a fraction of the time of regular roasties
• Gives a meal the roast dinner feel without all the faffage

Having Aunt Bessie’s roast potatoes in the freezer is a brilliant time-saving hack, because while I love home-made roasties, when things are busy and stressful you just want dinner to be ready as soon as humanly possible.

With Matthew still suffering with chronic back pain, things have been more than a little upside down in our house for the past few weeks. And when one thing is off kilter, everything else seems to topple at the same time. Corner-cutting meals have always been my favourite, and now more than ever!

Slimming World Friendly?

Well the Stuffed Butternut Squash has a few ingredients in that you might think tip the calorie count, but I’ve kept them pretty minimal in order to get the delicious flavour and crunchy texture that I was after with this dish, without it having to be a total blow-out.

You have a few options here, you can either count the full Syns (8 per serving), or you can make a few adjustments to my recipe and use your Healthy Extra allowances for:

• The Blue Cheese: 25g = 5 Syns or use 35g of Danish Blue Cheese on your own portion and count it as your Healthy Extra A Choice.
• The Nuts: 25g = 7.5 Syns or use 14 whole plain Cashew Nuts and count them as your Healthy Extra B Choice.
• The Breadcrumbs: 25g = 3.5 Syns or use a slice of bread from a wholemeal loaf to make your breadcrumbs and count them as your Healthy Extra B Choice.

Then of course you just pile your plate high with plenty of greens, and Syn any of the trimmings you might fancy.

Disclosure: I have been commissioned by Aunt Bessie’s to create and share this content with you, and was compensated for this blog post. All views are my own and I only endorse products I genuinely use myself.

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