I don’t write about cooking very often on Lemonade Life. Despite some previous attempts at expanding our culinary skills, for the most part we eat a lot of pre-made food from Trader Joe’s that we just heat up. Occasionally we cook some recipes, but it’s not something that happens very often.

Last winter, we hosted Christmas dinner at our apartment when my parents and younger brother came to visit. For dinner, we made a lot of traditional favorites, but I wanted to do something different. After looking at several recipes online, we discovered Butternut Squash Casserole on AllRecipes.com. It looked tasty, so we decided to make it! It was a bit tricky because we’d never made it before and we didn’t have all the dishes we needed because we weren’t buying anything before our wedding.

For Thanksgiving this year, we did not host it, but instead went to Erik’s sister’s house for dinner. But we wanted to contribute something, so we cooked up the Butternut Squash Casserole, since it was the only festive thing we knew how to cook. This year, we had the right casserole dish and whisk that we needed, and I think it turned out even better than before.

Even though Thanksgiving is over, this is a perfect seasonal dish for a holiday part or for Christmas Eve / Christmas dinner!

{The Recipe}

• Ingredients:

Casserole:

1 butternut squash
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pinch salt
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 eggs
1/4 cup margarine, melted

Topping:
1/2 (16 ounce) package vanilla wafers, crushed
1/2 cup margarine, melted
1 cup brown sugar

• Directions

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).
2. Put butternut squash in the microwave and cook on high, until soft, 2 to 3 minutes. Cut in half, scoop out seeds and cube. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add squash and cook until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain and mash.
3. In a 9×13 inch casserole dish combine 3 cups mashed butternut squash, white sugar, milk, vanilla extract, salt, flour, eggs and 1/4 cup melted margarine.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 45 minutes, or until set.
5. In a medium bowl combine crushed vanilla wafers, 1/2 cup melted margarine and brown sugar. Crumble over top of cooked casserole and return to oven to brown.

Although the recipe instructs you to buy a whole butternut squash, we actually found butternut squash already peeled and cubed at the grocery store. We bought two packs of the butternut squash, which equaled almost the same weight as the whole squash. It was so much easier than having to microwave, cut, peel and scoop.

It’s incredibly easy to mix everything up in a bowl, but make sure it’s big enough! We started out with a small bowl to mix the flour and eggs and vanilla, but had to transfer it to a bigger mixing bowl.

We have a slightly different shaped casserole dish from Crate & Barrel that we used to cook the casserole. As long as it’s fairly deep, whatever you have should work, I think. Last year we used a much shallower pan and it didn’t have the right consistency.

Ta da!

We actually forgot to take a picture of the casserole once it was browned, because we were rushing out the door. But it looks very similar to this. It took about 10 or 15 minutes for us to brown the topping. Basically looked like this, just a little, well, browned!

If you make it, let me know what you think!