Butternut Squash Wild Rice Stew is a New Seasonal Staple
Review by Katie Fugett
As a stack of neglected cookbooks sit in my bookshelf, I save recipe after recipe to my meal-planning Pinterest board. I certainly don’t have the time to try out everything, but when a recipe for butternut squash wild rice stew floated into my feed, I knew I needed to get cooking. I gathered my ingredients, and despite having to make a few changes, I found the recipe to be clear and easy to follow. The best part — the stew was delicious, and I look forward to introducing it to the rest of my family.
This recipe for butternut squash wild rice stew is posted on a blog called “Making Thyme for Health,” which is run by Sarah, a food blogger based in Athens, Georgia who creates seasonal, plant-based recipes. After trying her stew recipe, I’m interested in trying more of her creations. Not only was the stew delicious, but her instructions were easy to follow. Her blog is clean and beautifully designed, and she includes a breakdown of each ingredient with explanations of why they are included. From the autumn vegetables to the cashew cream base, I knew from the start how each ingredient would contribute to the dish in terms of flavor profile and health benefits.
I’m a lover of fall flavors, and I’ve lately tried to incorporate more vegetarian and vegan meals into my meal planning. This recipe turned out to be a tasty combination of seasonal flavor and a healthy serving of vegetables. I was drawn into this recipe by the promise of butternut squash in a warm stew, but I was delighted to discover that the recipe is also completely vegan. However, when I arrived at the grocery store, I wasn’t so excited to discover how pricey the recipe would be for a college student’s budget. Sarah’s recipe calls for raw cashews and wild rice, which are relatively expensive ingredients compared to potential substitutes. So instead, I substituted coconut milk for the cashew cream and brown rice for the wild rice, which each cost only a fraction as much.
I set up shop in my kitchen, and the recipe was smooth sailing from there. Sarah’s recipe is written to serve six people, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep that much leftovers. Fortunately, the programming Sarah uses for the recipes on her website includes a feature which divides ingredient quantities for you if you want to change the number of servings. Although it would have been simple math for me to calculate myself, I found this feature extremely useful, as I can sometimes get caught up in the cooking process and forget that I’m supposed to be reducing ingredient quantities until it’s too late.
The instructions were clear, thanks to Sarah’s direct language. It was also incredibly simple, as the entire meal only required a single pot and a cutting board to prepare. I only faced uncertainty when I prepared the leek, as I’d never cooked with a leek before and I needed to look up a video about how to properly prepare it. The stew also took longer than it should have to complete, since I used brown rice instead of wild rice, and brown rice takes longer to fully cook. From when I broke out my cutting board to when I ladled a spoonful of stew into my bowl was roughly an hour and a half — half an hour longer than what Sarah estimated in her recipe.
I enjoyed a serving of my stew, and as I packed away the leftovers I was already excited to eat it again the next day. This warm medley of autumn vegetables is both healthy and cozy, perfect for chilly winter nights — when you have the time to invest in its preparation. Sarah’s butternut squash wild rice stew is now a seasonal staple in my recipe arsenal, and I look forward to preparing it again soon.
