Stuffed Acorn Squash Recipe
A homemade leftover inspired stuffed acorn squash recipe. Roasted and stuffed with sausage and an Italian style sauce.
Do you ever wonder just what to do with leftovers…. I love creating new things from little bits of this and that from previous meals.
This day I combined some leftovers I had in my fridge with an acorn squash and ended up with a delicious lunch!
I could see doing this as a planned thing for dinner in the future. Yay a new recipe!
First I’ll tell you just what I did. But remember this was a leftover lunch. Much of this could be substituted for other things. I’ve got some ideas I’ll share at the end of this recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 Acorn squash
- ½ cup Rotini pasta
- 1 leftover breakfast sausage patty
- ½ cup leftover spaghetti sauce
- ½ cup mozzarella cheese
- Olive oil
- Salt and pepper
Procedure
Cut acorn squash in ½ and remove the seeds. (I bet this would work with any type of winter squash! I could easily see doing this with butternut squash too.)
Place your squash in an oven safe pan and drizzle with a little olive oil and salt and pepper to taste.
Cook ½ cup rotini pasta according to the package directions. You’ll actually end up with more than you need but just keep it in the fridge. Heat it up tomorrow add some butter, garlic salt and parmesan cheese. oh wait…… that is a whole other recipe. Back to my squash bake.
Chop your sausage patty and mix with the spaghetti sauce. (I used breakfast sausage but italian sausage would be great too.)
Now you are going to layer all your ingredients in the well of the squash. Kind of like a squash lasagna. Sort of…
Start with a spoonful of spaghetti sauce. Top that with some pasta. Place a pinch of mozzarella on top of that. Top with another spoonful of spaghetti sauce. You will probably not get a lot of layers but two layers is good. Final layers should be spaghetti sauce and then a pinch of mozzarella.
When I started this I was going to bake them in my cast iron skillet and cover with tin foil. But then I realized that my skillet was going to be too shallow. The foil would stick to the cheese and I’d lose my topping. Who wants to lose their cheese?! Not me. So I transferred over the squash to my deeper, still cast iron, dutch oven. It is well loved and royal blue… isn’t it pretty!
Cover and bake at 350 for about 1 hour 15 minutes. Check for done-ness by sticking a fork down into the squash. Is it tender? It is done!
Remove from the oven and let sit for 3 to 4 minutes. Serve! Yum. I love squash and my leftover items dressed it up nicely.
Stuffed Acorn Squash Recipe… here are some adaptations. The sky’s the limit!
Now for adaptations. You could use any type of winter squash. You could substitute another type of pasta or even leave out the pasta. I found it wasn’t really needed. Some ricotta cheese would have been perfect! Italian or any other type of sausage would have worked well too.
A Mexican version of this stuffed acorn squash recipe could have been made with salsa and peppers. Oh I could see using my home canned elk with this. Some salsa, a bit of cilantro and cheddar cheese.
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