Kid One came home from work one evening this winter with a dozen farm fresh brown eggs and a butternut squash. Considering he works at a boating supply store, I did think  it was a little strange, but he was happy about the swag so I didn’t ask.

We went through the eggs pretty quickly – I know what to do with those. But the squash sat on the counter for several weeks, staring at me. I had to reach past it on the counter to reach into my bowl of onions, garlic, and potatoes and soon started feeling guilty about it. I’d never cooked a squash before (big gasp from some of you) and I just wasn’t feeling it.

Then I went on a field trip with Kid Two’s class to a farm where the kids made vegetable soup. The docents explained that they preroasted the squash to make it soft and bring out the flavor. They had sliced it into strips, ready for the kids to scrape out and mash the soft squashiness to add to the soup. I took this was a sign from the food gods and went home and to roast my squash and work some magic.

I decided to make squash risotto out with arborio rice from my pantry (really, it’s just a drawer) and homemade chicken stock from the freezer. Because I have a deep-seated aversion to following recipes, I thought I’d improvise. I make risotto with chanterelles and lots and lots of saffron and it’s always fantastic, so I went ahead and mixed saffron in with the stock. It was a labor of love: the constant stirring, adding small ladlefuls of hot broth to the rice, stirring, stirring, stirring, adding small chunks of roasted squash, stirring . . . it took about an hour standing over the stove before it was finished, and about 9PM before we sat down to eat it.

And honestly, it was just okay. I added way too much squash and it looked too soupy to be good risotto, and the saffron taste got lost with the squash, and the homemade stock didn’t have enough seasoning so there wasn’t enough zing. Or salt. To top it all off, the saffron-squash combo made it WAY too orange. Here’s a photo:

It wasn’t too bad, though, as far as experiments go. (In a prior post I may have mentioned my leftover salad soup, which was a definite low point in my culinary investigations.) I’ve got to keep going with this now – I won’t be able to give up until I conquer the butternut squash.