Are you off grains but still crave the delicious taste of lasagna?  This recipe includes all homegrown ingredients except the bacon, cheese, salt, and pepper, and you could make the bacon and cheese yourself if you're more hard-core than us.

• 1 cup of dried tomatoes
  
• 1 pound of bacon (some of the grease used and some discarded)
• 1 large butternut squash
• 3 onions (or 2 if you want it less onion-y)
  
• 1 pound of chicken breasts
  
• swiss or mozarella cheese, plus parmesan and cheddar (about half a pound total)
• salt and pepper to taste

Soak the dried tomatoes in about a quart of water for at least two hours, until they're mostly plump.  Discard the water, chop the tomatoes into small pieces, and set aside.

Meanwhile, bake the bacon by laying the slices on a tray in a 350 degree oven, flipping them over when the bottoms are lightly brown, then removing the bacon from the grease once slices are fully cooked.  Leave the oven on when you're done to preheat for a later step.

Pour off part of the bacon grease into a skillet and use it to saute the onions (chopped into small pieces) and chicken breasts (chopped into bite-size chunks).  You'll want to cook the onions for a while (about five minutes) before adding the chicken so both ingredients are done at the same time.  I add the salt and pepper at this stage, being sure to add about twice as much as I'd usually want for the onions and chicken since the seasonings will be diluted later by being mixed with the other ingredients.

While the onions and chicken cook, slice the skin off a butternut, then remove the seeds and cut the flesh into cubes.  Put the butternut cubes into a 9X12 baking dish, then break the cooked bacon into little pieces to mix into the squash.  Add the chopped, rehydrated tomatoes and the cooked onions and chicken.  Top it all off with cheese --- I'm lazy and just layer slices of the cheddar and swiss or mozarella over the meat and vegetables, but you can grate the cheese.  Either way, sprinkle grated parmesan on top.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for about an hour, until the cheese is turning brown on top.  Cool for 15 minutes so you don't burn your tongue.  Serves 9 to 12.

Those of you who realized this is really the same recipe (in my head at least) as the cabbage skillet pizza I posted about a month or so ago get a gold star!  Because bacon's the same as pepperoni (highly-seasoned, fatty meat), dried tomatoes are the same as tomato sauce (tomato taste), and butternuts are the same as cabbage (sweet, carb-rich vegetable), right?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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