Comfort me with butternut squash and rice

I made something delicious.

Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Petersen (who has a lovely newsletter of her own) tweeted last week about making this baked rice with butternut squash, which sounded marvelous. I had a butternut squash on the counter and rice in the cupboard. She said she added sausage to it as well. I had hot Italian sausage.

So with some minimal and at times accidental tweaking of the recipe, I made it.

First of all, I really didn’t follow the recipe very well. I was trying to file an errant piece at work and my head was somewhere else. But it turned out just fine, which suggests to me that this is a very good recipe for people who are feeling distracted and want some comfort food, and also, that it takes kindly to substitutions.

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and stuck the squash in there for a half hour. (It wasn’t a very big one, but you don’t have to cook it till tender; you just want to be able to cut it.) Then I took it out, turned up the heat to 400, cut off the top, bottom, and peel of the squash, and cut it into pieces, about an inch cubed.

While it was baking, I chopped 3/4 of an onion that I had in the fridge. I chopped four garlic cloves (rather than the two it called for because you should always double the garlic, people on the Internet never have enough garlic in recipes). I reconstituted some vegetable broth from the Better than Bouillon stuff I keep around. (Yeah, it would be nice to have broth in the fridge or freezer, but that presuppose you have a full-sized fridge and freezer, and that you don’t share it with two other people. Bouillon is fine.)

Meanwhile, I put 2 cups of broth and 1 cup of water in a pot with a cup of the rice, heated it up juuuust till it was simmering, and then turned it off and let it sit. I didn’t have short-grain, so I used basmati. (This was not quite right; more on that in a moment.)

I didn’t have sage or white wine, so I didn’t use it. But I did have (uncooked and uncured) hot Italian sausage I picked up at the farmer’s market, so I cut all four links into slices. In retrospect, the apple and sage sausage would have been great in here too, but the hot Italian stuff gave it a kick.

I heated up a glug of olive oil over medium heat in a big skillet with higher sides, because you’re kind of going to cook up the whole thing in the skillet before you transfer to a baking dish. Then I cooked the onion till it looked translucent (about four minutes on my very hot oven), then added the garlic and cooked another couple minutes. I added the sausage and cooked another minute, just to brown the sausage. You’re going to bake it, so you don’t have to have everything cooked through.

At this juncture you’re supposed to add the rice to the pan and fry it for a minute with the onions, but as you recall, I had already put it in with the broth. Whoops. So I just dumped the broth and rice mixture in with the onion mixture. (Basmati takes a little longer to cook than short grain, so this may have been the right choice anyhow.) I added the butternut squash and some oregano (improvising, since I didn’t have thyme), and salt and pepper, stirred it all around for a minute, and then poured it into a shallow 13x9 baking pan I’d already greased with olive oil. Then I popped it into the oven.

Bake for 30 mins, stir gently, grated some parmesan onto it, and let it cook 5 more minutes for the parmesan to melt.

The result is a little like risotto, to be honest — would have been even more so if I was using short-grain rice — and it was delicious. I can think of a million ways to change this. You could probably use another winter squash, maybe delicata, or even maybe carrots or turnips? You could leave out the sausage, or use different sausage, or probably you could add little meatballs if you were careful. I think it might work to add chopped greens, though I probably wouldn’t (they’d make a good side sauteed with garlic though).

Also, it’s filling. For two hungry adults, this made enough for dinner, lunch the next day, and maybe one more eeked-out serving as a side. It would be a killer Thanksgiving side, too, come to think of it, especially since you can make it essentially vegan if you leave out the meat or use a meat substitute.

Most importantly, it’s cheap and it’s comforting. We need a little financially-responsible comfort now.