Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

When Brian asked me to look for new recipes to use up our plentiful supply of butternut squash, I recalled one I'd seen a while ago on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Vegan Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese. We'd previously tried the Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder from the same site, and it hadn't at all successful, but I thought this squash-based "cheese" might be more successful. Most of the ingredients in it—onion, garlic, butternut squash, veggie broth, nutritional yeast—were things we liked and already knew would go well together, so it didn't seem like it could go too wrong.

However, there was one ingredient the recipe called for that we didn't have: white miso paste. We assumed this would be easy to find at our local H-Mart, which carries all kinds of Asian foods at affordable prices, but Brian couldn't find it there—nor at the Ranch 99, another Asian grocery store a little way down the street. Our local SuperFresh had some, but it was $9.99 for a 14-ounce package, which seemed a bit much to spend on an ingredient we'd never used before and might never want to use again. We finally managed to locate a smaller package for $2.99 at Trader Joe's—a 5-ounce resealable tube that we hope will help the stuff keep long enough for us to use it up.

Making the "cheese" sauce was simple enough: just saute the onion and garlic, then add the cubed squash and broth and cook it until tender, and then puree the lot in a blender with the nooch, miso paste, and a little salt. However, the volume the recipe produced seemed like far too much for the three cups of cooked macaroni it was supposed to cover. Fortunately, Brian had decided to cook a whole half-pound of elbows, which came out to about four cups cooked, because even this larger volume of noodles was more or less swimming in the sauce. It was more like a soup than a pasta dish. 

As far as I was concerned, these messed-up proportions more or less ruined the dish. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor of the squash sauce (although, like the other mac & cheese recipe from the same site, it tasted nothing at all like cheese), but there was just too much of it. I tried to eat it carefully so that the noodles were distributed as evenly through the sauce as possible, but I still ended up with a significant volume of cheese-sauce soup in the bottom of my bowl that I had to spoon up by itself. This wasn't at all agreeable and left me with no appetite for the leftovers. 

Fortunately, Brian didn't mind it as much, so he was able to finish it off over the course of the next few days. But neither of us feels much inclination to try it again. In theory, this dish might be okay if we just made a smaller volume of sauce. But why bother making a squash-based pasta dish that's only okay when our Brown Butter Butternut Squash Pasta recipe (and the new vegan variation we've created) is already delicious without any tinkering?