Soup to Dutts

I love butternut squash. I think it might be my favorite vegetable. So, when someone left a big butternut squash in the break room at work a few weeks ago, I was all over it. I was craving pasta last week and decided to attempt making a lasagna, since I'd bought most of the non-perishable ingredients before Christmas and had never gotten around to making it. But instead of making the traditional red-sauce version, I made a sauce out of this wonderful squash and Italian sausage. It was delicious! I didn't use a ton of cheese since the squash was slightly creamy, so that made the dish a lot lighter, and it still made 12 hefty portions. I'm definitely adding this to the regular rotation of dinners at our house! I hope someone out there will give it a try and let me know what they think! Don't be overwhelmed by the ingredients list...most of the ingredients are pretty inexpensive and easy to find, and you may even have a lot of them already on hand! Butte

I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of combining chocolate and fruit. I don't know what it is, but something about it just doesn't taste right to me. Unless that fruit is a banana. Bananas are creamier than most other fruits, so I guess it meshes better in my mind, I dunno. So, this week we happened to have some very ripe bananas, which pretty much automatically means banana bread is on the way. And we also happened to have some leftover chocolate chips (from a fantastic chocolate mousse that Tom made on Valentine's Day). So I found a recipe that looked like it could be easily tweaked to add chocolate chips, and the result was an oat-y banana bread that had just a touch of sweetness. It's also relatively low-fat, thanks to the use of applesauce instead of oil or butter. And I should mention, it comes with a lot less drama than that disaster of a banana chocolate chip pound cake I attempted last year... So, it didn't rise as much as other banana bread