I suppose I should back up and explain how and why baby food was being served last night. You see, it wasn't baby food from the store, although I did have a friend in L.A. who used to love eating just that. Seriously, his whole thing was that you could buy a lot of baby food at the store, just throw them in your bag, and whenever you wanted a snack, open the jar and there you go. There was a certain logic to his thinking, in the sense that it is hard to bring with you a "turkey dinner" and all the other varieties of baby food that exist; on the other hand, you get a lot of looks on the backlot of Warner Bros when you're sitting around eating baby food.
So last night's baby food began on Saturday when I purchased a nice butternut squash from the Durham Farmer's Market. I didn't know what I specifically wanted to do with the squash when I purchased it, so when I got home, I started flipping through a few of my favorite cookbooks to get some inspiration. I couldn't decide if I wanted to do some sort of soup, which is always nice, or do something like roast them. And as I was flipping through one of my Tyler Florence cookbooks, I saw in the index that there was a recipe for roasted butternut squash with caramelized onions, ginger, and cinnamon. Well, that sounded interesting so I thought I would go with that. When I flipped to the recipe page, I immediately noticed it was one of his homemade baby food recipes! Oh well, I guess I'll look for something else.
But then I thought about it for a moment. I looked at the recipe again and thought, you know what? This looks pretty damn good. So what if the butternut squash gets turned into a puree?! Harris Teeter sells pre-packaged butternut squash puree that's good, why not make my own? And so that is exactly what I did.
The recipe is basically as follows. You cut a butternut squash in half and place it face up on a baking sheet (removing the seeds first). You throw some sliced onion rings on there with them, drizzle it all with olive oil, and roast in the oven until they are done (the onions are done first, so you have to take them out or else they'll burn). In a food processor, you then puree the butternut squash, onions, a tablespoon of grated ginger, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. That leads to something that looks like this:
With the baby food, I had some of the leftover risotto, baked salmon (which I just put in the oven with the squash), and a salad of the oak leaf lettuce, broccoli, and carrots (also from the market). The final dinner looked like this:
A little closer view of the puree and all:
