My Dad came to visit us this Christmas and brought with him this GIANT Butternut Squash! Have you ever seen such a thing?!?! We just can’t get over how huge this squash is – it’s over 2 feet long.

We decided that it was special and should be cooked up for Christmas dinner. There was so much squash that we made both Smashing Squash and Sweet Baked Squash – both were delicious!

The best tasting butternut squash will have deep orange colored flesh which this one contained. We saved all the seeds so that they could be planted again next year. I haven’t had good luck with growing squash here because of the high humidity, but I’m hoping Dad will have good luck with these seeds and grow a few of these giants next year. A friend of Dad’s gave him this squash so most of the seeds will go back to him.

How to Cut and Cook a Butternut Squash

At first, we weren’t sure the best way to tackle cooking this. My hand was getting cramped just thinking about all that peeling. Or, if we went with splitting it and baking, would it even fit in the oven!? Dad remembered seeing somewhere how you could slice a giant squash like this in disks and bake them, then scoop out the flesh. I googled around trying to find that method with a few more specifics with no luck. So, thinking for a minute… When I cut them in half and bake them, none of the cut part is exposed to the heat directly as it sits in some water on a baking sheet. If we did this with the disks, the exposed flesh could dry out. So, we decided to cut the disks and place in a baking dish with a little water and cover the whole thing with foil. This would keep everything moist and avoid all that peeling (which was my main goal in this project.) Turned out that this was a pretty good method for cooking squash, especially a giant like this one.

After baking for about an hour at 400 degrees, we took it out of the oven and scooped out all the squash.

The kids had so much fun with this squash. They like to help in the kitchen anyways, so it didn’t take much convincing to get them to help cut and scoop the seeds. Before we cut into it, a few of the kids wagered a bet on how many seeds it contained. Em guessed 246, Chris guessed 382, Car guessed 239, Dad guessed 347, and Cal guessed 302. Turns out it contained 392!, although Chris did the counting so we’re suspicious. 😉 We sure had a lot of fun with that Giant Butternut Squash! 🙂