7 Shares

If you’re looking for a delicious, warm, hearty, but healthy side dish for dinner, this parmesan roasted Delicata squash fits the bill perfectly!

If you haven’t tried delicate squash yet, you will absolutely love the firm, creamy texture and mild flavor. This recipe is one of my absolute favorite ways to serve winter squash.

Delicata is not sweet at all like butternut squash, which, up until I married Gabriel a little over a decade ago, was my sole experience with a winter squash, and one of the reasons I never ate it – because I thought you had to mix winter squash with butter and brown sugar to make it edible.

But come to find, savory winter squash recipes are an absolute delight!

Especially since my husband loves to grow winter squash, so I needed to find a savory way to eat it without violating my “sugar is for dessert, not dinner” principle, haha.

In this case, we have a light coat of oil to facilitate roasting, and flavor it with salt, pepper, and parmesan. I like to add some onion powder too for extra zing.

This is a surprisingly fast, easy side dish, because there’s no need to peel your squash – which also makes it a pretty side dish with the nice creamy off-white and green striped scalloped edges showing.

All you need to do is split your squash in half, scoop the seeds out, and slice before tossing them with olive oil and seasoning.

My kids surprised me by devouring these roasted squash like french fries – dipped in ketchup.

I suppose I’m a bit of a purist, but I like to savor the roasted flavors on their own.

A few notes:

If you have freshly grated parmesan, that’s a top-notch ingredient, but if not, the dry, powered/canned parmesan works really well too.
Freshly cracked pepper has an amazing flavor that compliments this dish. If you have it, definitely use that over pepper that’s been sitting, already ground, for ages.