Recipe of the Month: Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni

Around the end of October, I finally got around to picking up and going through that month's edition of Savory, the free magazine from Stop & Shop. The last few issues haven't held anything of interest, so my hopes weren't high, but this time I found two recipes that looked worth trying: a mushroom soup and a butternut squash pasta. And since we just happened to have about half a squash in the fridge left over from the pizza we made to celebrate Late Harvest, Brian decided a half recipe of the pasta would be the perfect way to use it up.

Although it sounds fancy, Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni isn't really hard to make. (Actually, we used penne instead of rigatoni, because that's what we had, but it didn't seem to suffer any from the substitution.) The recipe calls for pre-cut chunks of butternut squash, but using whole, fresh butternut squash isn't that much more work, especially since you have to cut the big chunks into smaller chunks anyway. Nearly much any other kind of winter squash would be a big hassle to peel, but butternut is actually pretty easy, and in this particular case, our squash was already peeled and sliced from the earlier recipe. So it was just a matter of cutting it into cubes and sautéing it in a pan with olive oil and garlic. The most intimidating-sounding part of the recipe, making the brown butter, turned out to be quite simple: just add the butter to the pan with the squash for the last several minutes of cooking. Once everything is tender, pull it off the heat, toss it with the pasta, and top it with salt, pepper and Parmesan.

But although the dish wasn't at all complicated, it definitely wasn't lacking in the flavor department. I'd had all the ingredients in this dish before—pasta, butternut squash, garlic, butter, fresh sage—but putting them all together in this way gave it some kind of indefinable extra flavor that didn't seem to come from any of them. I'd never had anything made with brown butter before, and I'm not sure whether that was what made the taste so subtle and complex, but it definitely seemed to be much more than the sum of the parts.

The other really nice thing about this recipe is that it doesn't call for any ingredients we don't normally have on hand. Pasta, olive oil, garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan are all staples in our house, and fresh sage grows right outside the door year-round (as long as it's not buried under a foot of snow). So this will make a nice, hassle-free addition to our regular repertoire of butternut squash recipes (butternut squash lasagna, pizza, and soufflé). And since it's easy to scale the recipe, we can rely on it any time we need to use up some extra butternut left over from any of those other dishes. It's definitely a keeper.