Fall Foods and Sausage Stuffed Acorn Squash

Fall is my absolute favorite time to cook. I love  seasonal fall foods. I am kind of sad that I am so busy this fall because I am just dying to cook some festive food. However, I have lots of great ideas for this fall. Check out some of my seasonal fall foods from previous years:

• Apple Upside Down Cake
• Pumpkin Cinnamon Chip Cookies
• Pumpkin Dump Cake
• Caramel Apples
• Caramel Apple Cookies
• Caramel Apple Cake
• Stuffed Zucchini
• Stone Fruit Cobbler

I got two acorn squash on Saturday with Bountiful Baskets. Bountiful Baskets is a non-profit co-op with locations all over Idaho, Arizona, Utah, and a few other states. You pay fifteen dollars on Monday or Tuesday online, and then on Saturday you go to a designated pick-up place and get a laundry basket full of fresh produce. It is all really good quality and it is well worth 15 dollars. It is a gamble because you don’t know what items will be in the basket, but I think that is the fun part. You get fruits and vegetables that you might never get just at the grocery store. In this basket (our first one) we got a huge bunch of green leaf lettuce, 2 bunches of celery, 2 acorn squash, a bunch of apples, peaches, Asian pears, a bunch of concord grapes (the kind that taste just like grape juice), two large bushels of broccoli, a bunch of bananas, a paper bag full of fresh okra (I love okra), 6 or 7 onions, and some kind of fruit that tastes like a mix between a pear and a plum (amazing).  So for dinner I took one of the acorn squash, halved it, and made sausage stuffed squash. It was very fast and easy. I had dinner on the table in less than a half hour.

Ingredients:

• 2 medium acorn squash
• 1 lb. Italian sausage
• 1/2 C.  finely chopped celery
• 1/2 C. finely chopped onion
• garlic powder to taste
• 1/3 C. sour cream

Directions:

1. Cut squash in half and remove seeds with spoon. Be careful, it is pretty tough to cut through. To soften it up before cutting, pop it in the microwave for a minute or so and then try cutting it.
2. Place squash cut side down in a microwave safe dish with 1/4 inch water and microwave on high for 10-12 minutes, or until just tender. Mine took 10 minutes.
3. While the squash is in the microwave, crumble sausage into a skillet and add celery and onion. Cook until meat is no longer pink. Season with garlic powder to taste. Drain.
4. Remove from heat and stir in sour cream. Spoon sausage into squash halves.
5. If needed, cover and microwave on high for 1 minute or until heated through.  Mine was plenty hot so I skipped this step. But if you let the squash get cold, you will want to microwave it.

Note: I halved the recipe and just used one squash. It was plenty for two people. You might need to do two rounds of microwaving if you use 2 squashes.

Recipe adapted from www.food.com