Stuffed Acorn Squash
My favorite fall dinner, this acorn squash is stuffed with a mixture of turkey sausage, wild rice, mushrooms, onion, Swiss chard, sage, and garlic.
Servings: 4 people
Equipment
- Baking sheet with parchment paper
- 12-inch cast iron pan
- Small saucepan
- Cutting Board
- Sharp Knife
Ingredients
- 2 small acorn squash
- 1/4 cup wild rice, cooked (yield = 1 cup cooked)
- 1 box Stove Top Stuffing, Low-Sodium Chicken flavor (or stuffing of your choice)
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1/2 pound ground sausage (we use our homemade wild turkey sausage)
- 1 small yellow onion, diced
- 3 big leaves Swiss chard, chopped
- 8 ounces baby Bella mushrooms, chopped (or mushrooms of your choice)
- 4 leaves fresh sage, finely chopped
- 2 cloves fresh garlic, minced
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. While it's preheating, cut your acorn squash in half, being careful to not cut off your arm in the process. Seriously - be smart with your knife, I'm not being funny. Take your halves and scoop out the seeds from the middle I like to use a grapefruit spoon with serrated edges for this.
- Place your squash on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Drizzle some olive oil and sprinkle a little salt on the top of each squash half. I like to cover mine with tinfoil while they bake, it keeps the moisture in the squash. A baker with a lid would also work if you have a large enough one.
- Put the squash in the oven and bake until the middle is fork-tender. This will take between 45 and 60 minutes or so, depending on the size of your squash.
- While the squash is baking, you can prepare the rest of your ingredients. To make for quicker meal prep at dinner time, you could bake the squash earlier in the day or the night before - that's up to you.
- In one small saucepan, cook the wild rice per package directions. You could also use brown rice here, a rice pilaf blend, or other grain of your choice.
- In another small saucepan, prepare the Stove Top (or other stuffing of your choice) per package directions.
- In a saucepan on medium heat with olive oil, brown the sausage. When it's nearly done, remove it from the skillet and put it on a plate. In the same saucepan, toss your diced onion and let saute for a couple of minutes, add Swiss chard and cook for several more minutes. When the onions and Swiss chard are starting to get tender, toss in the mushrooms, then the fresh sage and garlic. Season to taste with salt and pepper. At this point, you can stir the sausage back into the mixture, add the wild rice, and remove from heat. (Don't do anything with the stuffing yet.)
- When the squash is done, take it out of the oven. Turn oven down to 350 at this point but leave it on - we'll use it again in a minute. Let the acorn squash cool for a bit, until you can touch them to remove the squash from the shells. I like to remove all of the squash pulp from the shell and mix it into my meat and vegetable mixture - like you do when you make twice baked potatoes.
- When you are done getting the squash out of the shells, you then have your mixture of sausage, rice, vegetables, and squash - and you stuff it back into the shells. Finally, you top each one with stuffing. For this recipe, I used two small acorn squash and didn't use the full box of stuffing. You can see what you think when you make it, but you can always save some of the stuffing for something else if it seems like it's too much.
- Once the squash is stuffed and topped with stuffing, put the baking sheet back in your 350-degree oven for 20-30 minutes - uncovered this time. Cook until heated through and stuffing is starting to get crunchy on top.
- Serve with cranberry sauce as a garnish if you would like, or you could actually put some Craisins in with the filling mixture too if you'd like. Walnuts would also be good in the filling! There isn't an exact science to exactly how to stuff them, this is just how we like to do it.