Roasted Acorn Squash

We had this as a side dish tonight and it was like having dessert during dinner!

2 acorn squash
butter
brown sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut each squash in half (not through pointed ends). Scoop out the seeds. Trim the pointed ends so that squash can rest flat on their bottoms, so to speak. Grease a 9 x 13 pan and place squash cut sides down in pan. Bake for 1/2 an hour, then take pan out of oven, flip squash so that they are resting on their trimmed ends, and bake for another 1/2 an hour. Remove squash from oven and let them cool for about 10 minutes or until you can handle them without burning yourself. Scoop out the cooked squash into a serving bowl with a spoon. Add a few tablespoons of butter and as much brown sugar as you like and stir it up.

If you manage to scoop out the squash without damaging their skins, you could always stuff the filling back into the skins to serve it. We just dole portions out from the serving bowl.

Three variations on this recipe:

1.) Instead of butter and brown sugar, you could make it savory with olive oil, salt and pepper.

2.) My Mom's way: In the final 1o to 15 minutes of baking time, take the pan out of the oven and put lots of butter and brown sugar in each little squash half. Pop them back in the oven so that it all melts together. Serve one squash half to each person. They can scoop their own squash as they eat it.

3.) Skip all the additions, and just eat it plain. It's sweet enough on its own, in my opinion, but I could never get Ben or the kids to eat it this way!