Butternut Squash Pasta with Bacon and Sage Brown Butter

In celebration of Alana Chernila's new cookbook The Homemade Kitchen, we're lucky to share a sneak peek into the amazing spread of recipes cooked up by Alana. We also have an awesome giveaway -- For a chance to win The Homemade Kitchen cookbook along with some high-quality kitchen gear, enter the Giveaway below! 

If you follow Alana's cooking blog Eating From the Ground Up, you'll instantly recognize her comforting tone as she guides you through the cooking process -- focusing on the pleasure of working in the kitchen and reminding us that: "Homemade food is the opposite of perfection. It holds the stamp of its maker."  

Surrounded by the beauty of western Massachusetts, Alana lives with her family where she writes, cooks and teaches cheese making workshops. Her first book, The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods you Can Stop Buying and Start Making is down-to-earth, practical and inspiring. Her approach to making healthy homemade versions of store-bought packaged foods often laden with additives and preservatives is thoughtful and realistic for parents.

With plenty of winter squash around, we chose to make Alana's butternut squash pasta dish featured below. Roasting the butternut squash and onions on our stainless steel roasting pans made this recipe easy to prepare and quick to cleanup thanks to a sheet of parchment paper. Alana's tip to scoop out the seeds with an ice cream scooper worked like a charm. My favorite part was making the brown butter with fresh sage leaves (still going strong in the garden) in this cast iron melting pot. This was the signature flavor! Of course, it's always helpful when a prepared dish still tastes great for a few days -- we packed leftovers up for school lunch!