Recipe of the Month: Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash

Last summer, Brian and I discovered a great vegan mozzarella recipe on the blog "It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken." It was so much better than any of the more expensive nondairy cheeses we'd bought at the store, and so easy to make (much easier than real homemade mozzarella, which we've also attempted), that I decided to sign up for her weekly recipe mailings. And last week, my email brought me one that looked so tasty and interesting, I just had to try it: Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash.

You can get the full recipe on her site, but the gist of it is, first you cut acorn squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake them. Then you stuff them with a filling made from quinoa cooked in veggie broth with onion, garlic, chopped nuts, dried cranberries, thyme, sage, salt, pepper, and cinnamon. There was nothing in that description that didn't sound good to me. Plenty of healthy fresh veggies, quinoa to supply carbs and protein, and an interesting combination of flavors and textures. How could it miss?

We already had most of the ingredients needed for this recipe on hand, but we needed to buy the dried cranberries and, of course, the acorn squash. Since the recipe said two squash would make four servings, we decided to buy just one for the two of us. On a trip to Shop-Rite, we spotted acorn squash for just $1 a pound, but we decided to hold off and see if it was available at the farmers' market, figuring we were willing to pay a little more for the sake of supporting local farmers. That turned out to be a smart move. Although it was a very chilly trek out to the farmers' market on Friday, with the temperature at around 43 and a stiff wind blowing right in our faces, the butternut squash there were only 75 cents a pound—so buying local actually saved us money. One good-sized squash cost us $1.80. As for the cranberries, we needed only a quarter-cup of them for the halved recipe—which was fortunate, since these suckers are really expensive even when bought in bulk. That one scoop of them cost us $1.55, nearly as much as the squash.

Since we had other activities going on Friday and Saturday nights that cut into our cooking time, Brian waited until tonight to make the dish. It wasn't all that difficult, just a bit time-consuming, since the squash halves took about 40 minutes to bake (5-15 minutes longer than the recipe's estimate). However, there were no such complications with the quinoa filling, which went pretty much according to the instructions. The recipe offered a choice of different nuts to include in the filling, so Brian used walnuts, which we had on hand; salting it "to taste" came to about 1/4 teaspoon for the half batch. The only thing he admits he may have fudged a bit is that he didn't quite halve the amounts of fresh herbs he used when halving the recipe.

The finished dish was certainly pretty to look at. The baked squash halves, with their golden color and scalloped shape, looked quite appetizing with the filling mounded up over their tops. Appearance-wise, at least, it was a dish you wouldn't hesitate to serve at a fancy dinner party.

And taste-wise? Well, it certainly wasn't bad; it just wasn't quite as good as I expected based on the ingredient list. Part of the problem may have been that Brian used a rather generous hand with the herbs, so the filling was a bit too wibbly-wobbly thymey-wimey for my taste. But mostly, I just didn't like the baked acorn squash quite as much as the butternut squash we usually make. Although it was certainly cooked through and tender, it seemed a bit stringier than the butternut squash, and it didn't have the same sweet, full flavor. As I said, it wasn't exactly bad, just a little tasteless. However, I found that sprinkling on some of the squash seeds, which Brian had roasted without cleaning them first, as Martha Stewart recommends, helped quite a bit. And while the dish wasn't exactly bursting with flavor, it certainly was filling; although Brian finished his whole squash half, I only got through half of mine before hitting the full mark on my internal gauge.

So would we make this recipe again? Well, probably not. Though it wasn't that hard to make, I wasn't exactly crazy about it, and the dried cranberries make it a little pricey for a dish that we don't both love. Instead, I might be inclined to try a different squash recipe from the same website, Stuffed Roasted Butternut Squash. This one uses butternut, a squash I know I like, and mixes the flesh of the squash in with the stuffing, which would probably help distribute the flavor better. So keep an eye out for that dish in a future blog post.