Sweet Potato Fries and Butternut Squash

The third Dark Days post, nice! The first two posts were a challenge and I felt like the recipes sucked because of my Daniel Fast. This will be the last week of my Daniel Fast! I am making a lunch for myself with a butternut squash and a sweet potato. I will be slightly breaking my Daniel Fast with some local maple syrup and frying the potatoes. I bought the sweet potato and the butternut squash from the co-op; they had the "buy local" sticker next to them. They are both local with-in the rules of the challenge.

I cut the top half of the butternut squash off and used it in a soup for my last Dark Days post. I like to roast the lower half of the squash. I just cut it down the center. I leave all the guts and seeds inside. I typically eat everything including the skin.

With the sweet potato I tried something new. I normally cut the potato into fries and bake them for a half hour, take them out, mix them up and put them back in the oven until brown. I have done this several dozen times and I never REALLY like them, so I will finish them off by frying them in some sunflower oil.

To get started I cut the potato into 1/4"x1/4" fries and let them soak in cold water for a few hours. I drained the water and coated them with sunflower oil and spread them out on a baking sheet. I then roasted them at 350 for 40 minutes.

During this time I cut the squash down the center. Slightly oiled a baking sheet putting the squash inside down and roasting it at 350 for 45 minutes while cooking the sweet potato fries. I took out the squash when it was the color I like. I took out the fries when the bottoms were starting to brown and set aside.

I pan fried the fries in the sunflower oil. This is one of my first times using that type of oil and I found out it has a lower smoking point than what I am use to.

The fries turned out awesome. The texture was very good; soft in the middle and a crunchy outside. Sweet and yes, salty... I had to salt them! The squash was very good too! I poured some maple syrup on it and salted it. It's been a while since I've had a squash, so it was a nice treat.