Our best healthy squash recipes

Our best healthy squash recipes

Winter squash and pumpkin add flavour, colour and tons of nutrition to your meals. Try these healthy squash recipes to boost your intake’and share your own favourites in the comments.

Honey-Roasted Squash with Crumbled Feta and Walnuts
This is a wonderful autumn salad that’s a snap to put together. If I roast the squash a day ahead I can assemble the salad in 10 minutes’the time it takes to warm the squash in a 350°F oven.

Sweet Roasted Butternut Squash and Greens over Bow-Tie Pasta
An autumn supper in a bowl, this is a ‘sauce’ that you roast in the oven in about 30 minutes: chunks of sweet squash, roasted herbs, and greens. Add half-and-half, toss with hot pasta and cheese, and you have a great sell to the anti-vegetable contingent.

Butternut Squash and Leek Tarts with Pancetta
Cut the tarts for an appetizer, serve one per person for a great first course or accompany with a salad for a wonderful brunch or lunch.

Penne with Roasted Squash and Sausage
You’ll love this delicious and flavourful dish. When the squash is puréed with extra-virgin olive oil, it has a very creamy consistency’no need to include any fattening cream. The rest of the flavour in this dish comes from the simple combination of roasted garlic, sage, feta cheese and sausage.

Roasted Cherry Butternut Squash
Rehydrated dried cherries turn simple roasted butternut squash into a special side dish.

Butternut Squash Gratin
Hiding inside a butternut squash’s skin is dense, mildly sweet orange flesh that’s an excellent source of disease-battling beta carotene. A big butternut can be a bit tricky to cut up; you’ll do best with a large, sturdy chef’s knife.

Squash, Ricotta and Sage Gnocchi
There are numerous versions of gnocchi. Here a flour-based dough of ricotta cheese and mashed squash, flavoured with sage and Parmesan cheese, is used. A colourful roasted red pepper and onion sauce completes the dish.

Squash and Chickpea Stew
The orange colour of squash signals beta carotene, a plant pigment that’s a potent disease-fighter. And this is a meatless stew, so the total fat content is minimal. Like all good stews, this is a fine make-ahead recipe.

Spiced Pumpkin Tea Bread
Here’s a delicious, richly coloured tea bread that is moist enough to eat without butter. It makes a great addition to a healthy lunchbox, being rich in essential antioxidants, vitamins and minerals.

Roasted Vegetable and Pasta Bake
A hearty vegetarian dish packed with flavour, this selection of vegetables’butternut squash, asparagus and leeks’is roasted in garlicky olive oil, then tossed with chunky pasta shapes and a cheese sauce.

Winter Squash Bread
This moist, spicy bread is a perfect foil for almost any soup, from cream of tomato to fish chowder.

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