Roasted Butternut Squash and Lentil Linguine (and orzo!)

4 Miles went off without a hitch! Only a stitch.. in my side, that is. I took it slow for the first part of my run, just concentrating on running, and not speed. Then I felt better later, and picked up the pace. 

Lap pace: 11:24

Distance: 4 miles

Temp: 70 degrees.

Finally, it’s starting to feel nice out. It’s even getting down to the high 40’s at night. Nick and I keep one window open at night, because it actually feels awesome to be cold. Yeah, we’re kind of weird. But then, I think the people who are wearing gloves and coats when it’s 60 degrees are kind of weird, too.

There was a terrible vegan challenge at work today. They were celebrating October birthdays and they brought in carrot cake cupcakes. That’s not too bad, really. I had just eaten lunch, so I just hung out with my coffee. BUT THEN, one of our consultants brought this ‘Cinnamon Crème cake’. It looked like a coffee/bundt cake.  Pretty sure something with the word ‘crème’ in it, isn’t vegan. It wasn’t bad at first, but the longer I sat there, the more I wanted one. 

I ended up leaving without eating one. Huzzah! 

Now for something interesting that I’m not sure I’m going to like. All the ingredients are things I like…. So it’s got a fighting chance. It’s called:

Linguine with lentils and roasted butternut squash. 

½ cup brown lentils

1 medium butternut squash, peeled, halved, seeded, chopped

2 Tbsp olive oil

½ cup minced yellow onion

4 garlic cloves

2 tsp dried sage

1 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, undrained

1 cup veggie stock

12 oz linguine

This is prework: you need to cook the lentils and roast the squash first.

1- Bring the lentils to a boil in a medium saucepan. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 45 min.

2- Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Oil a pan that will hold all the squash. Cut it into ½ “ cubes, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BE CAREFUL! Butternut squash is a tough customer. It has a tendency to be hard and kind of slippery. So be careful. And then roast for 30 min.

3- In a large skillet, add the chopped onion and 1 Tbsp olive oil. Saute about 5 min. Add garlic and cook for about 30 sec. Add sage, tomatoes, cooked lentils and veggie stock. Season w/ salt and pepper. Simmer about 5 min. You can use an immersion blender or a reg. blender if you want to make this sauce creamier.

Stir in the roasted squash and keep warm over low heat.

Cook the pasta according to the directions and toss the lentil squash mixture and pasta to combine.

Since I didn’t have enough linguine for this recipe, (oops!) I added the only other pasta I had. Orzo. I know, random. So I decided to use my immersion blender so that the orzo would kind of stick with the linguine.

Here it is before I mixed it all up!

I think I ended up using too much pasta, actually. I wanted more sauce! It was a little bland because of the lentils, but spiked with sweet butternut squash. I was disappointed when I was full, because I wanted to keep eating it!

Mixed with the pasta: