Easy Butternut Squash Carbonara

This easy butternut squash carbonara is not only easy to make, but it’s also super tasty and actually a pretty healthy version of your more traditional carbonara.

I should say before I start though that a true traditional Italian carbonara has just five ingredients – pasta, eggs, hard cheese, cured pork, and black pepper so this is my version of the dish which I originally made kind of by accident as I was making some of my spicy butternut squash and sweet potato soup but I made it too thick so decided to try and use it as a pasta sauce as I’d read a few times that Butternut Squash made a good carbonara-style sauce.

The taste was there but it was too watery really (I know – too watery for a pasta sauce but too thick for a soup) so next time I made it, I just roasted the exact same ingredients that I’d usually pop in the soupmaker and blended them together once they were cooked. I used that as a pasta sauce with some spaghetti and some shredded gammon that I had leftover and voila – my easy butternut squash carbonara was born. 

It’s not the prettiest dish but I guarantee you’re going to love the taste of it – it’s amazing! Real comfort food that I could eat again and again…

I always have frozen butternut squash chunks in my freezer as well as a big bag of frozen red onion so I tend to make this sauce in batches without the sweet potato as it freezes really well. I buy frozen butternut squash chunks from Tesco as they’re £1.50 for a bag of 500g which isn’t too much more than a fresh one would cost me and a premium I’m good to pay for the fact I then don’t have to do the peeling and the chopping myself. 

Easy Butternut Squash Carbonara

Yield: Serves 4

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 40 minutes

Additional Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 55 minutes

This easy butternut squash carbonara is my healthy version of carbonara and I absolutely love it! It's easy to make using ingredients I usually have it and tastes AMAZING!

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Ingredients

• 500g Chopped and peeled butternut squash
• 1 red onion roughly sliced
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp mixed herbs
• Olive oil / Frylight
• 150g shredded / finely chopped ham
• 100g pasta per person
• Optional: I add some finely chopped red chilli to mine too which is an un-carbonara-like as you can get but it's from when I started making it from my soup ingredients

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 200 c
2. Add the cubed butternut squash, sliced onion, garlic (and the chilli if you're using that) into a large baking dish and either drizzle with olive oil or spray with Frylight.
3. Sprinkle over the mixed herbs and give it all a good mix together so all the flavours are combined.
4. Pop your tray into the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes. It totally depends on the size of your butternut squash chunks here as to the length of time it'll take to cook. The batch I made today was using some quite big chunks do actually took 45 minutes but it's not usually that long. I usually start checking after 25 mins and use my wooden spatula to break it down a little bit every time I check so it's starting to mash together as it cooks.
5. Once the butternut squash is cooked through then I take it out of the oven and leave it a couple of minutes before blending it with my stick blender (which is a game-changer by the way).
6. I then set it to one side and cook my pasta according to the instructions on the pack.
7. Once the pasta is cooked, I'll pop the butternut squash mush into a pan with the ham and thin it out a bit using some of the water from the pasta.
8. The last stage is to add the pasta in, give it a quick mix and make it look pretty on a plate.

Notes

If I'm going to freeze any sauce, I do that at step five.

 

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