How to use up butternut squash?

Most Friday nights we have a traditional Jewish Friday night dinner and we do a little ceremony called Kiddish. For the Kiddish I bake or buy a special type of bread called challah bread. For the meal we often have roast chicken, roast potatoes and roasted butternut squash. After one Friday night dinner recently, I had some butternut squash left that needed using up and some leftover egg that I had used to egg wash the top of my homemade challah bread with. My husband has a thing for afternoon tea and I have been making banana tea bread quite regularly, but this week I didn’t have any bananas at all. Let alone any that were going over ripe in the bowl.  So  I thought  – butternut squash tea bread, why not? I found this recipe on the internet and adapted it to fit the ingredients I had available.      

Zero Waste Butternut squash tea bread recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 beaten egg (or remains of an egg used for egg washing purposes)
• 250g grated butternut squash (approximately – if you have slightly more or less that is fine) . If you have a different type of squash or pumpkin or even an unripe squash you could use that instead.
• 90g cooking olive oil
• 85g water
• 350g self raising flour
• 30g honey
• 30g agave nectar (I only used this because I ran out of honey.  You could substitute this for honey)
• 30g light muscovado sugar
• 30g dark muscovado sugar
• 100g brown sugar 1/2 tsp of ground ginger  

Note:  if you don’t have various varieties of sugar, as long as you have 160g in total you can use just one type, although I wouldn’t recommend just using the dark muscovado sugar as it has quite a strong taste!    

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl with a wooden spoon.  
2. Pour into your loaf tin and bake for 40 -50 minutes at 175 degrees C.  I use a stoneware loaf tin to bake.

Tip: line the bottom of your loaf tin with reusable or eco friendly greaseproof paper – to make sure it fits exactly place your loaf tin on the paper, draw around the bottom and cut it out! I actually cooked my loaf for an hour, but I think it was a bit overcooked around the edges.

I wasn’t sure about it when it was first cooked as it smelled of butternut squash!  Once it had cooled though, you would never be able to tell it contained butternut squash and made a lovely healthy scrumptious sweet snack for afternoon tea!