I love butternut squash.  LOVE IT.  And with a farmer’s market just outside our building every Saturday morning, once fall was officially here, I was bursting to get a-cookin’ with some locally grown veggies.  Last year I learned how to roast a squash.  This year, I figured I could tackle some new recipes while at home with our little one.

 

The first project I had in mind seemed easy enough: butternut squash soup.  In fact, it seemed so easy that I thought I’d throw in some homemade biscuits.  You know, just because.

 

And so, one evening, I whipped up this little dinner for myself:

 

 

Mmm mmmm.  Hot soup, warm biscuits—the perfect thing to warm me up on a crisp fall evening.  I’m sure it would have been. . . . had I eaten it hot.

 

When the biscuits had come out of the oven and I put the last dash of spice in the soup, I felt a certain sense of victory.  Yes, I am the mother of a newborn, at home alone for the day, but I’d just cooked a complete dinner—and one I’d never attempted before—from scratch.  I felt like a women of the prairie, back in the day.  A regular do-it-all, nothing-can-stop-me, feed-my-whole-family-and-darn-a-couple-of-stockings-in-the-meantime kind of gal.

 

And then the baby cried.

 

As grateful as I am that Jacob quickly developed a good sense of what was “day” and what was “night,” he also seems to have figured out when our mealtimes are.  And no matter how soon before a meal I feed him, he wants to be part of the action when we sit down to eat as well.

 

Not a problem, really.  Of course I would have liked to eat this meal warm, but it reheated just fine.  Lesson learned, right?  Not possible to cook, eat, and clean up dinner when at home alone with a newborn.  I should just pick one of the three, be satisfied with that, and deal with the rest later.

 

So a week or so after, when I bought another squash, I should have anticipated that making squash lasagna, which requires a good deal more preparation than soup, and of which I have no pictures because we ate it too quickly, would be even trickier.  Foolish girl that I am, again I thought I could do it.

 

And I did.  I also managed to cover our stove with a boiled-over roux, which I didn’t find the time to clean up for about three weeks (and to be fair, John ultimately cleaned it up).  Again, it’s simply not possible to cook, eat, and clean up dinner when home with a newborn.   Lesson really learned this time . . . I hope.

 

On the bright side, I can now supply with great certainty the answer to the eternal question: Baby versus butternut squash?

 

Baby always wins.