Your New Favorite: Loaded Butternut Squash!

Today we're making these absolutely beautiful loaded butternut squash with bacon and feta cheese and here's everything you need. One whole butternut squash, some butter, spring onions, a block of feta cheese, smoky streaky bacon, creme fraiche or sour cream, Dijon mustard, coarse breadcrumbs and a little bit of dried thyme. So this recipe is a really nice way to use up butternut squash. Sometimes it's one of those vegetables you can buy you need just a little bit stuck to know what to do with it and this is a nice creative way and you can change and adapt the fillings to suit you. But first of all we need to take a nice sharp knife and we need to cut it in half. So make sure you've got it held nice and steady, place the knife in about halfway and then anchor it down to cut one half, turn it around and then do the same on the other side. And now that it's in half you can just take a spoon and we want to scoop out all of those seeds and any of those loose fibers that are in this cavity. So just run the spoon around and you should be able to get them all out in one go. Don't throw all of these seeds away because they will create a lovely nice crunchy top later on. We're going to toast them up, season them, they're going to be beautiful. So just take them away from the flesh and place them into some water and it's just a good way of using up the whole vegetable with as little waste as possible. Place them into a bowl of cold water and this is just to help clean them up before we toast them. Then we'll take them from the water, place them onto some kitchen paper and pat them dry. This of course is an optional step and you don't have to do this if you're really short on time or can't be bothered. We've cleaned off the seeds and we're going to place them to one side, we'll come back to them later on. But for now we're going to look at the squash and this is really simple. So first of all you can see here it's not exactly flat, there's a bit of a slope, we want it to be nice and level. So all I'm going to do is turn it up on its side and just slice the end of the larger part off. Just like that, not very much, you can see there just a tiny little bit and that will just help it lie nice and flat. So when we're baking and we put the butter on the top it's going to evenly bake without all the butter sliding off. So just do that to both sides and now we're going to add 40 grams of butter and all I'm going to do is simply break little bits off and place them all over the butternut squash and into the cavity. Generously season them with salt and black pepper and place them into a preheated oven at 190 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes to an hour or until the flesh is completely soft and cooked through. While our butternut squash is baking in the oven we're going to prepare some of the other ingredients. So I've got four spring onions, I've already trimmed the ends off and I'm just going to simply chop them up. And then when we get to the green bits we're going to separate them off and we're going to keep them to the side for a little bit of garnish later on. Next we'll chop up seven rashers of smoky streaky bacon. You could use ham, you could use gammon, you could use normal bacon, it doesn't have to be smoky but I think it adds a really nice flavour. I'm just going to simply cut them up into strips into nice little bacon lardons. Place the bacon straight into a hot pan over a medium high heat and fry off until they're nice and crisp. Then place them into a bowl and set them to one side. Don't wash this pan just yet because we're going to use it later and take advantage of all that beautiful flavour that's in the pan. And for a final bit of prep I've got a 200 gram block of feta cheese and I'm simply just going to crumble that up with my hands. So our squash is now nicely roasted and what we need to do is get a mixing bowl and then we're going to scoop out the flesh. So we'll just use a spoon again and then carefully because it's nice and hot, it's really hot in fact, we just want to scoop out the flesh. You can leave it to cool a little bit if you want, you know you don't have to do this straight away, leave it for 10 minutes or so. But you can just scoop out the flesh and we're going to place it into the bowl. Now when we're doing that we want to scoop the flesh but we don't want to go too close to the skin. We want to leave about a good centimetre of the flesh on the skin and that's what's going to hold the shape of the butternut squash for our filling to go back into. So now that all the flesh has been taken out I'm just going to use a fork and mash it down. You can obviously just use a potato masher, it doesn't need to be a super smooth mash though, just break it down as much as you can. So we'll do that, then we're going to add in the sliced spring onions, about half of the feta cheese, a third of the crispy bacon, 60 grams of creme fraiche or sour cream and 20 grams of Dijon mustard. Now mix it all together until it's well combined. We'll then season it to taste with salt and pepper. We'll now spoon the filling back into the butternut squash skins and we'll leave it looking nice and piled up and rustic on top. At this stage you could add extra cheese if you want, some cheddar cheese or something like that. I'm not going to bother this time, I'm just going to leave it as it is with all that feta cheese in there. And then we're going to bake it in the oven until it's golden and crisp on top. So while the butternut squash finishes off in the oven, we're going to make a beautiful crispy crunchy topping that's going to contrast with the soft filling of the butternut squash. So to do that, we're going to go back to our pan that we fried off the bacon in and we're going to heat it up and then place in our butternut squash seeds. We'll stir them through the fat and cook them over a low heat until they are crisp and golden. We'll then add in 40 grams of coarse bread crumbs or panko bread crumbs work great for this and toast them off until golden. Once golden, sprinkle in one teaspoon of dried thyme and the rest of the crispy bacon. Cook for one more minute and then remove from the heat. And then you'll have a beautiful toasted crispy crumb topping that looks just like this. So these have been baking for about 20 minutes now and they're just how I want them, nice and crispy on top, nice little crisp bits. You can bake them as long as you want until you're happy with how they look and how crispy they are. To serve them up, I'm simply going to place them onto a board or a plate and then sprinkle over that beautiful crisp topping and then top them with a little bit extra feta cheese and the green parts of the spring onion. Serve it with a simple side salad and that's your loaded butternut squash ready to enjoy. So there you have it, loaded butternut squash with bacon and feta cheese and the best thing is you can just go straight in with a spoon, get some of that crispy topping on there and scoop it out and that's beautiful. Nice tanginess from the cheese, saltiness from the bacon, crunchiness from the seeds, the bacon, the breadcrumbs, it's everything you want. I hope you enjoy this one. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.