Week 1: Day 3 (Italian)

Tortellini with Butternut Squash

Ingredients

• 1  small butternut squash (2 pounds), peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1/2  pound  button or cremini mushrooms, stems trimmed and halved if large
• 1/4  cup  fresh sage leaves
• 2  tablespoons  olive oil
• kosher salt and black pepper
• 1  pound  fresh or frozen cheese tortellini
• 2  ounces  fontina or Gruyère, grated (1/2 cup), plus more for serving

Directions

1. Heat oven to 450° F. On 2 rimmed baking sheets, toss the squash and mushrooms with the sage, oil, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Roast, tossing once and rotating pans halfway through, until the vegetables are tender, 20 to 25 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, cook the tortellini according to the package directions. Reserve ½ cup of the cooking water; drain the tortellini and return to the pot. Add the vegetables, fontina, ¼ cup of the cooking water, and ½ teaspoon salt and toss gently to coat (add more cooking water if the pasta seems dry). Sprinkle with additional fontina.

This was a terrible waste of time. Whoever included this should never curate recipes ever again.

Ease of Ingredients:  C

This recipe required fresh sage leaves, and fontina or Gruyere cheese.  A fresh herb and a fancy cheese, we're already off to a difficult start.  Luckily I live in a major metropolitan area and was able to get both items at Whole Foods.  It also calls for "cremini" mushrooms, which I couldn't find at Wal-Mart.  Since Whole Foods is pretty expensive, I wanted to limit the number of items that I buy there, so I substituted baby portobellos.  Turns out they are the same thing.  Since the magazine is called "Real Simple," they should use the most familiar name.  What a bunch of presumptuous a-holes.  Things didn't cost too much.  I'd estimate the total cost of this dinner to be about $15. 

Ease of Preparation:  D

The butternut squash was difficult to cut and damn near impossible to peel. The skin is tough and thick, like that of a pumpkin, so a potato peeler was not working well.  I tried a paring knife and a regular knife, and they both sucked.  I think Chris was better at it than me. Other than that, it was a fairly easy recipe, but it still gets a D because I cut my finger. 

Taste:  C-

The picture was taken directly from the Real Simple website.  My dinner did not look like that.  The squash did not roast with lovely little grill marks on it.  It turned mushy and tasted like a sweet potato, which is just the dumbest combination, filled pasta and a sweet potato.  The sage may as well not have existed, and the mushrooms added nothing to it.  The recipe says you can use fontina or Gruyere.  Fontina can be young and soft, or aged and hard.  Gruyere is generally a hard cheese, so to use them interchangeably in a recipe just seems incredibly vague.  It would be like using Philadelphia cheese in place of Parmesan.  

If you were thinking of making this recipe, I suggest you save yourself the trouble.  Buy the tortellini and some sun-dried tomato Alfredo sauce and have that.  Or forget all the ingredients except the Gruyere cheese, buy a bottle of Riesling and instead of having dinner, have some fun.

That being said, it was still edible.  I just hope Chris wakes up super hungry tomorrow and eats all the left overs so it doesn't go to waste.  By the way, the recipe makes four servings, and I had two guests over, so we should have finished it, but we didn't.

Left Overs:  ????

I have no idea how this will fare tomorrow.  I might pick up a jar of alfredo and try to improve it like that., or bake it with a bunch of mozzarella cheese.  Sometimes I bring home my Olive Garden left overs and pop them in the toaster oven and they taste even better the second day.  But Olive Garden actually tastes good the first day, so who really knows about this.

Update:  Chris got some tomato soup from yesterday and used it as a sauce, and that kinda fixed the problem.  That's what I like about Chris, he always fixes things.