Remember the Turducken? Well obviously that’s not happening in my vegetarian kitchen or on my parent’s vegetarian table.

But we do love to be creative and try new things–every year we have a little challenge (my sister, cousins, mom, and our various in laws) to find and make a new creative recipe. We send out links to new recipes the NY Times Thanksgiving recipes, the Washington Posts, Food & Wine, Food TV, and Vegetarian Times…and pick the ones we think are the best.

This year’s has promise of:

• An eggplant soup
• pumpkin ravioli
• butternut lasagna
• jalapeno cornbread
• a casserole featuring veggies, cranberries, and other ingredients…

This year, one of my entries was found by my husband. He found a cooking channel video for a vegetarian version of a turducken–a squash stuffed with a sweet potato, stuffed with leeks, stuffing and other items. I decided it was too simple (flavor wise) for our table..so I flavored it up. In went pesto, various mushrooms, a cornbread stuffing and jalapenos, among other things….oh yes. It was good. it will make an appearance on the table.

The recipe…
(aka, how does one do that and why?)

• 1 butternut squash
• 1 bunch of scallions
• 1 portabella mushroom
• 1 onion
• 3 chanterelle mushrooms
• 3 oyster mushrooms
• pesto
• 1 jalapeno pepper
• 2 Field Roast Mexican Chipotle veggie “sausages”
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 1 sweet potato
• cornbread stuffing mix (or stuffing mix…or stuffing from scratch, which was my original plan)
• 2 cups of vegetable stock
• 1 apple
• 1/8 cup pecans

1. Preheat the oven to 450
2. Peel the butternut squash and wrap in foil (you can pre-cook in the microwave if you want to bake it for less time).
3. Wrap the sweet potato in foil too
4. Chop the onion and scallion and saute until golden in a drizzle of olive oil. set aside.
5. Chop the mushrooms into 1″ pieces and sautee those too. Set aside.
6. Chop the red bell pepper and jalapeno and sautee. Set aside.
7. chop the sausages and cook for 5 mins.
8. Chop the apples and pecans.
9. Now…to prepare the stuffing: Toss  1/2 a package of stuffing mix, apples, pecans, and 1/2 of the scallion/leek, bell pepper/jalapeno, and sausage mixtures.
10. The oven should be hot by now. Throw the stuffing into a bakeproof (corning-like) pan and put it into the oven, along with the wrapped sweet potato and butternut squashes too. Bake all of it about 40 mins. Pull all of it out of the oven (but leave the oven on…you’ll need it in a fewminutes)
11. After 4o mins check the squash to see if you can cut into it. If you can…cut off the bulb end and spoon out the seeds. Cut the squash in 1/2 lengthwise.
12. Lay 1/2 of the squash in a baking dish. Drizzle a layer of pesto. Then spoon a layer of scallion/onion mix, jalapeno/pepper mix, mushroom mix, then stuffing.
13. Slice the sweet potato into wedges and add on top. Push down.
14. Repeat the layers until you run out (i did 2 layers)
15. Put some foil on top of the baking dish and put back into the oven.

Bake again 20-30 minutes.

Suggestions/hints:

• consider using smaller individual serving squashes–the big one is a little hard to cut/serve neatly
• we considered marinading the squash…maybe next time.