This is a simple little side dish that my kids absolutely adore and hey, any vegetable dish that I can get my kids to ask for is most definitely worth sharing, right?  It can be thrown together out of  a few simple ingredients and is ready in minutes, yet adds quite a bit of flavor to any plate.

I generally make this using frozen ingredients I always have close at hand, but there is absolutely no reason that it could not (and indeed should not) be made with fresh ingredients if you have them.  My kids, being of a generation quite content to eat frozen snacks heated from a box in the microwave don’t mind that I use less than perfect ingredients and it’s great in a pinch, but I’d probably opt for fresh if company was coming.

Regardless of the previous temperature of the ingredients, this is a very tasty dish and works very well with chicken, pork or fish.  It plays well with others and has been seen dancing with green beans, peas and broccoli a time or two.  Give it a try, I think you’ll like it!

(Note: I probably would have called it a corn relish on my own, but you try to get a nine and eleven year old to eat something called corn relish!  That’s way too far out of their comfort zone, so I dubbed it by what I tossed in the pan and they seemed happy enough.)

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Butternut squash is one of those things that until a year or two ago I had heard about but never really experimented with.  It’s also one of those things I lament not having tried earlier.  It’s great for a variety of things and I use it in everything from soups to chili, but to stay with the year’s trend of keeping things as simple as possible I give you butternut squash in its most perfect state; roasted.

While you can roast butternut squash in just about any fat that suits your fancy, I have several favorites.  The most common are extra virgin olive oil and bacon fat, but using bacon grease overwhelms the delicate flavor of the squash and I just happened to have something a little more exotic hanging around in my fridge when I decided to make this dish.

I had goose fat.

A quick note: Halving the squash before you peel it is a real time saver as well as a convenience.  It’s much easier to hold on to the squash while peeling if you have the dimple left by the seeds to hold onto while you’re removing the tough outer skin and the squash won’t want to slip all over the cutting board while you’re halving it. Once skinned, it’s a snap to slice the squash into manageable pieces for roasting.

Now I’m not saying that here’s anything wrong with olive oil and if you’re looking for a vegetarian snack or side you should most definitely use it.  In my case, having one of the holy grails of roasting fats on hand was more than I could pass up and the flavors of the completed dish were just short of absolute perfection (see my notes as to why it was just short and not right on.)

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Brussels sprouts.  As a kid the mere mention of the things would have sent me running to my room in fear, yet here I am sharing a recipe for them at the request of my kids, who absolutely adore them.  It’s a strange turn of events to be sure.

It’s strange the things I adore today that I never would have touched as a child.  I’m not sure if it was the lack of fresh ingredients in our diet for most of the year, or if my tastes have just changed that much.  I know that most of the vegetables we ate for may years were canned, that probably didn’t help.

In any event, these sprouts do not disappoint.  They have my Son’s seal of approval and I have to admit that I’ve eaten two plates of them in the last two days.  They truly are tasty. As a matter-of-fact, I think I’m going to add them to my permanent Thanksgiving lineup in one form or another.  That way I know my kids will eat at least one green vegetable at the family table…

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