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five ingredients – pasta, eggs, hard cheese, cured pork, and black pepper so this is my version of the dish which I originally made kind of by accident as I was making some of my spicy butternut squash and sweet potato soup but I made it too thick so decided to try and use it as a pasta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!

Print

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.

Don’t miss out on future posts like this – receive updates directly to your inbox by email by adding your email address here and hitting subscribe. You can also follow me on Twitter or BlogLovin and I’d love to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. If you’re interested, you can find out more about me here and while I’ve got your attention, if you’re wondering why some of my posts lately are a little bit less frugal then have a read of this post.

Do your future self a favour – Pin this ‘easy butternut squash carbonara’ for later: