How to Prepare Butternut Squash

How to Prepare Butternut Squash Beautiful, local butternut squash, how do you cut it? What do you do with it? We’re going to cut one today and it’s really, really easy. I like to use my chef’s knife to trim off the top and the bottom. Give myself a nice flat surface, okay. And then I’m going to cut it in half just like this. Secure your knife, come down both ways and cut all the way through until you hear that nice snap and then you have your butternut squash. Now, I like to use a vegetable peeler because butternut squash has a nice smooth skin it’s easy to peel. Okay, make sure you have a nice sturdy vegetable peeler. Okay, you could use a small paring knife for this too if you wanted to, there we go. I’m just going to set this aside here and then what you can do, I actually like to use measuring spoons because they have a nice little cup to them and scoop out the seeds just like that. A melon baller works really well here too just to kind of get into that natural cup of the butternut squash, okay. And then depending on what you’re using, I find cubes tend to work really well for roasting squash or if you’re going to be cooking it and boiling it in some water to make a mash. I like to cut off the top part and just cut it into lengthwise pieces first just like that and then chop it up. And this is where you can kind of control the size of pieces that you want but this is just a little bit bigger than about a one-inch cube and it’s great for roasting it. It’s like the perfect size. It only takes about 40 minutes in the oven. And when you’re buying, you’re looking for your butternut squash make sure it has a nice firm and heavy texture and a heavy weight to it. So there you have your butternut squash all chopped up, ready to use, cutting the butternut squash was the hard part. The easy part is roasting it or boiling it at home in your kitchen.