Mac & Cheese with Roasted Winter Squash

Classic comfort food--with the addition of a seasonal vegetable. Long-storing winter squash is cubed, roasted, and tossed into macaroni and cheese flavored with Italian sausage.

Long-storing winter squash are one of the ways that I feed my family from the farm share during the off season when we're not getting weekly boxes of fresh vegetables. For today's recipe I chose one of the squash that came from my compost pile. I'm thinking it's a cross between a butternut and a pumpkin or maybe it's an albino pumpkin like all the albino squirrels in my town. Who knows? Either way, it was a pale fleshed winter squash, part of the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve in my cold basement, and worked just as well as a pumpkin or butternut squash would in this recipe.

I don't combine this stuff on a whim, you know. [That's not exactly accurate. On Monday I posted a recipe that evolved as I was preheating the skillet and my daughter was throwing out ideas, which turned into Mardi Gras Fried Rice. Whims were involved.] Last year I took a sugar pie pumpkin from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and baked mac and cheese in it. I got the recipe from the versatile cookbook, Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese (Amazon affiliate link). I first made that recipe before my spouse returned from a deployment. I was thinking that I had to make it again for him as the recipe is such a good one and because I crave comfort foods like mac & cheese when it's cold out. You can find that recipe here, or, if you're local to me, I donated a copy of the cookbook to my local library.

The thing is, I rarely re-make a recipe without tweaking it somehow.  [Heck, even my morning oatmeal is currently undergoing revisions.] When I was spooning that mac & cheese into the pumpkin, I wondered about skipping the adorable container/serving dish concept and instead stirring pumpkin into the mac and cheese and then baking it. I kept the rest of the elements the same because the flavors are so good together (I have made 4 or 5 recipes from MELT and each time was successful). Because the baking time is 1½ hours total, this is not a weeknight meal. However, it feeds 8 to 10 people and the leftovers reheat well, so it's a weekend meal making leftovers that could become lunches or fast dinners on hockey busy nights during the week.

For another mac and cheese recipe, please check out Macaroni and Cheese with Beet Greens, Ham and Manchego. For other recipes using winter squash, please see my Winter Squash Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.

Mardi Gras Fried Rice {Fried Rice with Purple Cabbage, Ham, Egg and Zucchini}

The colors of Mardi Gras in a fried rice--red cabbage, eggs and zucchini (with or without ham)--make this savory seasonal dish a colorful way to let the good times roll.

Why do Mardi Gras recipes have to involve pancakes or King cake? Can't we have some savory entrees alongside? I'm pretty sure the carbs and protein would help with alcohol consumption.

Howdy! I'm feeling a little sheepish here because if you subscribe via email [hey thanks!--if you don't, there's a widget along the right sidebar that makes it easy to do so] you'll know I messed up yesterday. See, I'm only sharing 3 recipes a week, but I'm cooking for the family, the team, the folks at work, and others all. the. time.  Any given week I've got a bunch more than 3 recipes that have the potential to be blog-worthy. These recipes pile up in notebooks and on scraps of paper. The photos pile up--in a well-organized fashion--in my laptop. Eventually I get around to typing them up for the blog, and when I do I tentatively schedule them for when they'd be appropriate. I've got a small butternut squash & spinach lasagna  recipe from last year that I thought would be good for February. I scheduled it for 2/1/2015 thinking that I'd sort out which Monday, Wednesday, or Friday would be best and get the post all buffed and shined [i.e., add photos and the sort of writing you're reading now].

Except I didn't realize that yesterday was February 1st, and there I was at Costco taking photos of my spouse while he tried on new eyeglass frames. [Ya know, if you need to wear glasses it's really hard to tell what you'd look like in new frames since you can't see out of them while you're trying them on . . . where was I?] Oh, right--so while I was at Costco the partially finished lasagna post automatically published, per the scheduling I did last year, and went out on email. I came home from the store to emails from my mom and Alanna notifying me. Whoops.

Now the cool thing of this very long and involved rambling is that Alanna taught me how to save all my partially finished posts as drafts, so theoretically this type of thing will never happen again. But I'd still appreciate it if you'd sign up to get the blog via email, because everyone likes bloopers now and again.

Loaded Pizza Fries #EatWithWest #ChubbyChasingMission #CysticFibrosisAwareness

Beef and salami sautéed with farm share vegetables then coated in a seasoned tomato sauce top these baked fries. Mozzarella and cheddar cheese covers the whole pan in cheesy goodness.

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For the first year of this blog I posted a new pizza recipe every Friday night. I shared recipes for pizza dough, savory pizzas with fruit, vegetarian pizzas and pizzas with meat toppings. I posted so many pizza recipes that I even created a Visual Pizza Recipe Index to keep them all tidy, and a Pinterest board devoted to pizza, Friday Night Pizza Night.
Over the second year I added to the Index more slowly, interspersing Friday pizzas with other types of recipes but broadening the types by adding Deep Dish pizzas [I'll probably add a Deep House Dish category to the VPRI at some point since I'm amassing a collection in my notebook].

Today's post is a three-way collision between a Friday pizza recipe & meaty appetizer, a bonus alternative use for the topping, and a request for my readers to help out a family in my town by posting photos on social media. Let's start with the food, which weaves its way throughout the post. I admit I'm slightly surprised by how this idea of mine turned out. When I started thinking about this recipe, I envisioned some sort of pizza-flavored sloppy joes served on slider buns. Kinda like these:

The flavor of the filling was fine, but it was too . . . sloppy for me. This is when the kids are pretty tickled to come home from school and hear "I'm trying a new recipe. Eat one of these pizza sliders for after school snack and tell me what you think." [They like those days better than the "we've got too many beets in the freezer, here's a smoothie" or "find something to eat, I'm busy editing" days].

I'm posting these photos of my kids eating on the blog for one reason--to encourage a little guy in my town, Weston, to take another bite of food. Weston is 3 and needs to gain some weight, and if he doesn't do it by eating he'll need to have a feeding tube inserted in his tummy. Seeing photos of folks eating tasty food encourages Weston to take another bite, so I've tagged this post with the hashtags #EatWithWest, #ChubbyChasingMission, and #CysticFibrosisAwareness. I'd really appreciate it if you could tag and share photos of you/your kids/your uncle eating and share them on your favorite social media channels too. 

You can read about Weston and his mom's social media campaign here.