A few months ago Tarah from What I Gather and Brittanie from Three Diets One Dinner came up with the idea of doing Paleo Pen Pals, a paleo themed food swap. Basically you’re paired up with another blogger (or reader) and mail each other one paleo food item. Then you have until the end of the month to use it in a recipe.
I’ve actually seen this done a lot on other food blogs but never paleo-themed. Mostly because it’s a little hard to think of non-processed foods that will survive in the mail. However my pen-pal, Chris, proved me wrong. She was able to send me these beauties and they survived the trip and then some!
Two acorn squash all the way from California. They not only survived the trip to Illinois, but then waited patiently while I was away in London. So as soon as I got back yesterday, I quickly flipped through all of the squash recipes I had book marked and decided on this one.
Ingredients
- 2 small acorn squash cut in half, seeds removed
- 6 strips of bacon or more diced
- 2 eggs
- 2 T coconut flour
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees (F). Cut your squash in half and spoon out the guts. Spread a little olive oil over the squash and season with salt and pepper. Place them face down on a baking sheet. On a second pan, spread out your bacon (I spoke about the ease of baking bacon in a previous post).
- If you can fit both in your oven, you can cook them at the same time. Takes 25-30 minutes. If you’re like me and realized too late that they won’t both fit, I cooked the bacon first and then the squash. Also save the bacon grease from the bacon. You’ll use it for frying the patties.
- Once your squash is soft, remove it from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes. Then scrap out the insides into a bowl, mashing it with a fork. Add your crumbled bacon, eggs, coconut flour, salt and pepper and cinnamon. The cinnamon isn’t actually in the original recipe. But while I was doing laundry earlier I started reading “The 4-Hour Chef” and felt inspired to take a risk. I had no idea how it would taste but I went with my gut.
- Heat up a pan on high heat and melt some of the bacon grease left over from your bacon. I waited about 3 minutes for the pan to heat up so I could get a nice sear on my patties. I scooped out maybe about 1/4 cup of the mixture for each patty and placed it in the pan.
- I cooked each patty about 3-5 minutes, flipping them over with my spatula. The ones at the beginning I had to cook for a bit longer to get a crust on each side. By the second batch, they crusted up a lot faster as the pan got hotter.
- In the end I was happy with them. And I do think the cinnamon added to the recipe. Although I’m also starting to think that I don’t really like acorn squash (or butternut). I’ve tried a few recipes in the past and haven’t been that enthusiastic about them (which is why I never posted them). I would say if I am going to cook with acorn squash, this would be the recipe I would do.
