A beautiful, hearty, healthy, and delicious Fall meal, featuring the delicious Delicata squash, quinoa, chard, and highlighted by a few dried cranberries. Adding very light spices to the quinoa brings out the warming Fall flavors of the entire dish. Delicata Squash with Quinoa, Cranberries, and Swiss Chard is easy to prepare and creates a nutritionally complete and beautiful showy meal, worthy of any Holiday table, but easy enough for any weeknight dinner.
Delicata squash seem to have come onto the scene rather recently. When I was growing up, the only squash I ever saw was Acorn squash (which fall into the Winter squash family) or Zucchini squash (which falls into the Summer squash family). Now, grocery stores carry a wide variety of shapes and colors of wonderful edible squash and pumpkins (pumpkin is a squash), with different textures and slightly different flavors. Delicata is nice because it's a small variety that bakes quickly, and the skin is tender enough that you can eat it! Flavor is similar to a butternut squash, but slightly creamier. Feel free to use your favorite squash in this recipe if you can't find or don't like Delicata.
If you'd like to serve this as a Thanksgiving or other holiday 'main', try baking round squash, such as Acorn or Carnival in halves until tender, and mix your quinoa and chard mix together to use as stuffing for the squash after baking. Garnish each half with a small sprig of rosemary. It will be such a pretty centerpiece and more self-contained on the plate for adding additional side dishes.
FODMAPs: Delicata squash is low-FODMAP at 1/3 cup or less, so cut back your serving size and perhaps bump up the quinoa. Dried cranberries are low-FODMAP at two tablespoons, therefore is low-FODMAP here if you divide the recipe among 4 servings, but not if you divide it into 3 or less servings. Quinoa and Swiss chard are both wonderfully low-FODMAP and make a great base which to build upon. Know your body, know your limits.
If you make this vegan, gluten-free recipe please give it 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ below and leave a comment! We'd love to hear your feedback.
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