Roasted Butternut Squash

My grandmother was a missionary in Papua New Guinea for 40 years. She and her husband raised 7 kids and translated several New Testaments into indigenous languages while living on an island with no amenities and very large snakes draping from the outhouse rafters.

I had the absolute privilege of living with my grandparents while my grandmother’s health deteriorated from years of taking the malaria medication used to keep them alive in their remote home. After we said goodbye to her, my grandfather and I learned to manage the laundry and cooking on our own, a highschool graduate and a tinkerer building his own plane in the garage. We did pretty well for ourselves, because we had abundant memories of her sweet smile as she’d bustle around in the kitchen preparing homemade meals from scratch every day.

This recipe, which isn’t really so much of a recipe as a method, is one I learned from watching her. She’d tell me about the tasteless yams she’d prepare for her family over the coals of an outdoor fire beside their little bungalow shack that was a mansion compared to how their neighbors lived.

Listening to her stories and relating them back to the childhood I had in Mexico as a missionary kid raised by her daughter was instrumental in my life. So much of it was so similar and yet so different. I didn’t have large poisonous bugs crawling in my bunk at night and our supplies weren’t flown out to us and dropped in barrels from the sky by plane. But we both understood what it felt like to be the wealthy foreigners on the block while living a lifestyle so humble and foreign to our friends back in the US. We both knew the distinct feeling of home never quite being home no matter what country we were in. And we both embraced the unique privilege of knowing how to prepare and enjoy two very different culture’s cuisines in the same meal.

And so it is with a full heart that I offer up my grandmother’s simple butternut squash baking method. Probably a method used by many generations across many continents. But in my mind, it will forever be linked to her never-idle hands.