Southwestern Acorn Squash

I love, love, love this time of year for the wonderful, seasonal food you can find, especially squash. All kinds of squash. I'm notorious (according to my husband, anyway) for stocking up on squash early in the season, storing it in the basement and then ... forgetting about it and never using it. I'm determined to not let that happen this year, especially now that we've gotten in the habit of eating our produce sooner than later with everything we get from our CSA box.

So a few weeks ago we picked up an acorn squash at the West Allis Farmers' Market, and I wanted to use it sooner than later. We usually make squash as a side dis--for acorn squash, I usually just roast it with some oil or butter, salt and pepper--but I wanted to make a whole meal out of it this time.

I easily found a recipe just by Googling acorn squash on my phone. The recipe I found was for Southwestern Stuffed Acorn Squash. There's a lot of good stuff going on in the dish.

I made a few changes/additions:

-The recipe calls for three squash, but I know we only wanted to use one for the two of us, so I cut parts of the recipe and just eye-balled a lot of the ingredients (such as the black beans, tomatoes and red pepper).

-I couldn't find turkey sausage at Outpost, so I just used ground turkey and flavored it with salt, pepper, garlic powder and some chili powder.

-Also, since we already had some Pecorino Romano cheese, I used that instead of Swiss. I think next time, while the Pecorino is delicious, it doesn't melt so well. I'd use a better melting cheese.

-We had an extra hot pepper from the CSA box, so I threw that in (I didn't think it was a hot pepper, but I later found out it was, since my hands burned the rest of the night ...)

The dish was very good. As Nate said, "it was actually really good." The flavors were great, and it was very satisfying. There's a lot you could do to mix up the filling. It'd be a fun thing to experiment with.