Stuffed squash

A couple of weeks ago, right after we had gotten our massive squash harvest, we did something we’d never really done before. . . created our own recipe.

Of course, I’ve always considered recipes more of a “guide” than a list of rules that have to be followed absolutely. And I frequently make my own additions or adjustments based on what we like and we have available at the moment.

But this was a little different.

We had all these wonderful little personal-sized squash. (Squash? Squashes?  Squashi? Anyway, quite a few.) So I thought, hey, why don’t we stuff them with something?  I was sure I’d seen a recipe very recently that was squash stuffed with a mixture that included Italian sausage and ricotta cheese.  And I just happened to have sausage in the freezer and ricotta in the fridge, so that seemed perfect. So, I looked in all the cookbooks that I use frequently, thinking it must have been in one of them.  Nope.  No luck.

So, I asked Trevor, who was using the computer already, to just do a quick search for sausage and ricotta stuffed squash.  Nothing. Which surprised me.

He did find a recipe for pasta shells stuffed with a ricotta and sausage mixture and baked in tomato sauce. . . so, I thought, what the heck.  We can adjust. So we used that recipe but skipped the pasta and the tomato sauce, and stuffed it into squash instead. We also substituted fresh sage for the basil in the recipe, thinking sage would go better with squash.

It turned out quite well.

Baked stuffed squash

It was really tasty–the sausage gave the stuffing a lot of flavor and was a nice contrast to the creamy baked squash. (That’s a small salad plate in the photo, so the squash is fairly small.)

Here is the actual recipe we ended up with:

4 small (personal size) squash
8 oz. sweet Italian ground sausage
2 eggs
15 oz. ricotta cheese
2 cups shredded mozarella
1/2 c grated Parmesan
1/8 c chopped fresh sage
salt and pepper

Scoop the seeds out of the squash from the top and bake them at 350 for about 30-40 min.

Cook the sausage, crumbling it into small pieces. Set aside to cool. In a large bowl, beat the egg, ricotta, 1 1/2 cups of the mozarella, about half the Parmesan, all the sage, and the salt and pepper. Add the cooked sausage.

Fill the squash with the sausage mixture, and top with the remaining mozarella and Parmesan.  Bake about another 30-40 minutes (or until the squash is tender).

Enjoy! And if you decide to give this recipe a try, please let me know what you think!