The Gay Vegetable of Choice - 2008 (Butternut Squash)

Name: ryanando

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Product:	Butternut Squash
Date:	12/04/08 (125 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tasty, filling, good for you

Disadvantages: It doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

It's official - the ninth of April is "Gays and Butternut Squash" day. I kid you not.

I'm currently in the middle of re-thinking my awful diet that is totally void of mostly anything good for you. In this re-think I have discovered a few nice items, so I'm now totally up for grabbing the oddest looking item when I'm at Tesco to try it out.

Gay and Butternut Squash day began like any other. Work, where I tell everyone to go do horrid things to themselves, then a joyous jaunt to the land of Tesco goodness. While there I spotted this odd looking and even weirder named object- The Butternut Squash.

Liking butter, nuts and squashing, I decided this was right for me. So into my basket it went, adding a whole 90p to my total. They will vary in price between 70p and £1.50 depending on the size and the place you shop. Tesco tends to have hotter staff.

When I arrived home I found out that five (and I am not kidding) of my fellow gay friends had been lured in by butternut squash on this particular day. None of my straight friends had been effected. Conspiracy!

Storing these objects of mystery could not be easier. Just leave it somewhere cool and dry. I am told you are not supposed to keep them in a fridge. Why? Who knows. They do, however, keep for around three months.

Now I finally got round to cooking it today and let me tell you, I'm confused.

First of all I spent a few minutes trying to decide if it is a fruit or a vegetable. A quick Google revealed its vegetable status. It looks like a misshapen and rather small pumpkin. Upon cutting it open, the flesh looks like a sweet potato. The seed part looks like a pumpkin. It smells, rather oddly, like a melon which I backed up by making my flatmate smell my fingers after getting all the seeds out. Even more weird, when I put it in the oven to roast...it started to smell MEATY!! For all you butternut squashes out there, I implore you to make up your mind.

As for cooking these things, there are a few different options depending on what you like. The skin is edible so you don't need to peel it if you don't want to. It softens a fair bit when you cook it so it can be blitzed to a puree or just munched as is. Being lazy, I opted to leave the skin on, though I'd recommend you peel it as the texture isn't all that nice. I chopped half of it into chunks and roasted it along with some sweet potato. After a little research I found the seeds are also edible, so I roasted them with a little salt. A lot of people will use this for a soup, you could most likely stuff it and roast it as the seeds leave a big hollow to put stuff in. I plan to try that out at some point.

The flavour of the Vegetable of Confusion is like...well... confusing. It's sort of like a sweet potato, but slightly sweeter, and a little nutty. The seeds taste kind of nutty too. Overall its certainly quite nice!

Nutritionally speaking it's rather good for you, providing you with tonnes of beta-carotene (which most orange stuff will have...apart from maybe those horrid orange leggings I saw some woman in the other week... and is good for your eyes), Vitamin C - which is great for your immune system, Magnesium- ace for your bones and muscles and Potassium which can stop heart disease...in rats. Must be a good thing, right? Our good old BNS is also high in fibre, the benefits of which I'm sure you all know.

Over all it's a nice healthy addition to any diet, tastes great and can be cooked lots of different ways.

Just make sure you mark 09-04-09 on your calendar as a day of gay delights butter nutty fun!... oh god that sounds awful...

(review also on ciao)

Summary: An odd, but very tasty vegetable.