Pancetta-Stuffed Delicata Squash

Take the best parts of pasta carbonara and stuff them inside sweet delicata squash for a delicious low carb meal. How can you go wrong with pancetta, onions and butter?

One of the first “gourmet” meals my husband and I ever made together was pasta carbonara. We were quite delighted with ourselves, really, because we managed not to scramble the eggs when tossing them with the hot pasta and thought ourselves truly amazing cooks. This is so ridiculously long ago now, almost 18 years, before we ever thought of getting married and having children. And it was in the most ill-equipped of kitchens in a funny little apartment in a podunk town in the southwestern corner of Colorado. So it was no small feat to not mess up the carbonara sauce in the old aluminum pots my husband had taken from his parents house when he moved out west. These things were decades old, with a mustard-yellow outer coating and uneven heat conductivity, and had been used in the family cabin and on camping trips. But they did the trick for our purposes apparently; they made a decent carbonara!

That meal lives on in our memory. We eventually got nicer pots and pans and we made many a carbonara in them, but none quite so special as that first sweet success. We’ve also greatly expanded our repertoire of recipes and become quite adept in the kitchen. We still make carbonara sometimes, but we don’t make it with pasta anymore. Spaghetti squash can be a great substitute, although it can add a lot of liquid so we cut down on the eggs and butter to avoid a soupy mess. It was actually my intention to share that recipe with you.

However, when I went to the store the other day, they had no spaghetti squash but they did have the much-harder-to-find delicata squash. Ever one to adapt my plans and my recipes, I thought it might be fun to fill the delicata with the sautéed pancetta and onions. I skipped the eggs altogether because they would cook through completely in the filling and that’s not really the point of carbonara. But I used all the other ingredients, including plenty of butter, white wine and parmesan. Do I need to say that it was delicious? I think not.

Please see my Pancetta-Stuffed Delicata Squash on A Sweet Life.

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