Vegan Recipe of the Month: Black Bean Butternut Burrito

This dish is not actually what I intended to post as my Vegan Recipe of the Month for March. Brian and I have been experimenting with marinated mushrooms as a bacon substitute, and so I was planning to make this mushroom bacon recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken and share the results with you. We've already tried using the same marinade on enoki mushrooms, and the flavor was indeed remarkably bacon-like, but the texture wasn't quite right. The skinny enoki mushrooms came out too thin and crisp, without the meatiness of real bacon. So our plan was to buy some white button mushrooms on our Thursday grocery run and then try the same recipe with those.

However, before we could head out on that shopping trip, we needed to put together a quick dinner with the ingredients we already had on hand. And Brian, finding himself contemplating a leftover chunk of butternut squash, some home-cooked black beans, an avocado, and a few scallions, decided to experiment.

Now, we had already tried a recipe (I believe it was a chili) that combined black beans with sweet potato, so we knew that pairing worked reasonably well. And Brian also knew that butternut squash is not too dissimilar to sweet potato in flavor and texture (not to mention color and nutritional profile). So he figured, well, this can't go too wrong, and he diced up the squash and sauteed it together with the beans, two scallions, and a little garlic powder and salt. Then he whipped up a simple guacamole from the avocado, the remaining scallion, and some salt and lime juice, and served the two things up together with flour tortillas and lettuce.

For an improvised, last-minute meal, this was surprisingly tasty. The light, firm, faintly sweet butternut squash balanced out the starchiness of the black beans even better than the sweet potato had, and the onion and garlic added umami (savoriness). Rolled up in a chewy tortilla with crisp green lettuce and buttery-soft guacamole, it offered a delightful blend of flavors and textures. Brian knew he had a hit on his hands when he asked me the next morning whether I would like the leftovers for lunch (since there wasn't enough for both of us), and I gave an enthusiastic yes. I felt a little bad about sending him off to work with only peanut-butter sandwiches, but he said he was just as happy either way, so I guess he didn't love it quite as much as I did.

Nonetheless, this recipe was successful enough and simple enough that I feel confident we'll be making it again. If you'd like to do the same, here's a rough approximation of the recipe, which I'm calling by the highly alliterative name

BRIAN'S BLACK BEAN BUTTERNUT BURRITOS

Dice about 4-6 oz. butternut squash into pieces about 1 cm square. Saute in olive oil with roughly 1 1/2 cups cooked black beans (or 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed), 2 sliced scallions, 1/4 tsp. garlic powder (or about 2 cloves minced fresh garlic, which we were all out of), and 1/2 tsp. salt (leave out if you're using salted canned beans). Cook until the squash is tender.
Prepare guacamole by dicing 1 avocado and combining with 1 sliced scallion, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. lime juice. Serve the beans on flour tortillas with guacamole and red or green leaf lettuce.