Vegetarian/vegan stuffed butternut squash

Only one week to go until it’s Christmas Eve! Time has flown by lately hasn’t it? I only have a few more new Christmas recipes to share this year before I head home. First one up is vegetarian/vegan stuffed butternut squash, which you can either serve as a mains as an alternative to stuffed turkey or ham, but you can also serve it as a side dish. I made a really easy stuffing of breadcrumbs, red onion, thyme, sage, parsley, bay leaf, pecan nuts, and butter and oil. You can use real butter or vegan butter, depending on whether you want to make this vegan or vegetarian. If you are going for vegan then make sure to double check the breadcrumbs as well, they usually are vegan but it doesn’t hurt to check.

The stuffing is supereasy to make, but cutting the squash and scooping out the flesh can be a bit tricky. To make things easier I pre-cooked the unstuffed squash to soften the flesh. Stuffing the squash then is very easy. The only tricky part left is that you cannot “test” if your squash is cooked or not. But you should be able to see from the outside and you could use one of those cake testers to poke into the squash to see if it’s soft enough. We ate this vegetarian/vegan stuffed butternut squash with some homemade cranberry sauce (with red wine) – recipe will follow in a few days. Since I made 2 stuffed squashes we had it vegan one night and then had it with some seabass on the second night. If you are serving it as a side then you could easily serve it with turkey, ham, chicken, fish, it truly goes with everything!