Sweet Potato Squash (Fancy)

This weeks recipe turned out to be a bit of a surprise. I had this yellow with green strips squash sitting over on my counter and I had no idea what it was. I made a couple of different squashes before, Butternut, Buttercup, Spaghetti and Acorn so I figured that I could just chop this one up into disks and bake it to see what it tasted like. So without a recipe I went to work.

Here is a shot of the mystery Squash:

Started with the Squash and I decided to peel off the outside skin. Then I decided to chop it into disks... but there were seeds inside. (of course there were! this is a squash!). I had chopped maybe half of the squash so I ended up cutting out the centers of the disks but with the second half I just cleaned it out and kept it as a larger piece (turned out to be a great idea later!). I put a little olive oil, salt and pepper on them and then into the oven (15 minutes at 350, flip and then 6 - 8 more minutes on the second side).

At this point I'm thinking "ok, maybe I can put some cheese, sour cream or green onion on top of this". I go into the fridge and there isn't any sour cream or green onion.... now what do I do? That's when I spotted the beet. I grabbed the beet, pilled it and then cut off some really thin slices. The Squash pieced had been in for the first 15 minutes, so I flipped them and put the beet slices on the pan with them.

Everything tastes better with bacon so I cooked up some bacon to go with it.

Now to layer it all together. I took the larger piece and used it as my base. I put on a couple pieces of the disks and half disk, 3 slices of cooked beet, goat cheese and then topped it off with the bacon. It turned out to taste really good! The goat cheese was a little to strong for this combination but all the flavors did come out when I took a bite. Oh! so what did the squash taste like? It tasted like sweet potato. The funny part here is that I didn't know that until I started writing this post as I needed to look up the squash to figure out what it was. But now I see why it's called a sweat potato squash!

You could easily make this as an appetizer but I used it as an extra side for my staple BBQ Chicken, Spanish Rice and Veggie (in this case it was corn) dish.

(I'm still working out on my plating skills and camera focus angles)