The Cost of Cooking a Butternut Squash

Two weeks ago, I showed off my freezer full of bulk cooking and set myself three challenges:

1) Spend the rest of the month eating what I had already cooked and frozen

2) …with the exception of buying and cooking a butternut squash, because Mike had just written about a Modern Farmer piece that implied a single person wouldn’t be able to cook and eat an entire butternut squash before it went bad

3) Keep my entire grocery spending for the month under $150

Let’s see how I’ve done so far.

First, I have very successfully managed to eat myself out of house and home. I defrosted soups, made casseroles, baked fresh loaves of bread, and put together those weird meals that you only create when you’re down to, say, bread and condiments. (Cream cheese and dill pickle sandwiches are not necessarily bad, but they’re a little bit unsatisfying.)

I still have one dinner’s worth of casserole and three dinners worth of soup left to defrost, which should put me right on schedule for Thanksgiving and the end of the month.

The butternut squash cost me $2.98, and I ended up getting three meals out of it. I started by slow-cooking the entire squash, peel and all, which made my apartment smell like a delicious and slightly cloying Yankee Candle.

Then I cut the squash open, scooped the innards out, and ate a third of them with a dollop of butter and a drizzle of honey. I also ate the squash with a $1.62 pork chop and probably $0.20 cents worth of broccoli, both roasted with maybe $0.10 worth of garlic and black pepper.

I was going to eat the squash without any additional entrees or side dishes, but I realized it would probably be a really bland meal — and then when I went back to the store to get the pork chops (three for $4.87) I figured I should get some fresh vegetables too, because I had eaten the last of those a few days ago.

So yes, it was definitely one of those “if you give a mouse a butternut squash, he’ll ask for a pork chop and a side of broccoli” things, which added a little bit to my food costs for the month (more on this in a minute).

I turned the rest of the butternut squash into soup:

This time I went savory, adding garlic, allspice, black pepper, and salt. It was much better than the butter and honey treatment, and now I want to make this soup for every meal going forward. (It didn’t hurt that the prep time was under five minutes — drop leftover squash into saucepan, add spices and a little bit of water, bring to boil.)

I have to confess that I’m definitely going to spend more than $150 on groceries this month. I’ve spent $219.22 so far, and I still have a few more things to buy for my Thanksgiving baking. I could try to equivocate my way out of this by saying some of my November grocery shopping was to feed guests, and some of it was on non-food items like toilet paper, and if I did the math on just food purchases I made for myself it would probably be under $150 — but that’s getting into Scrooge-like levels of calculation. I would much rather get excited about the awesome food I am going to bake for Thanksgiving, including this candy bar pie recipe that I just discovered.

But I ate all the squash before it went bad — and now that I know how easy and cost-effective it is, I will absolutely do it again.

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