A Quick Celebration of the Butternut Squash

My apologies for my recent lapse in blogging.  It's something I intend to get back into the swing of this weekend.  In the meantime, I'd like to invite you to take a few moments to celebrate with me the wonders of butternut squash.

The cause for celebration just now is I came home today to find a pot of squash seeds I planted about ten days ago has shown its first sign of life today:

I've never grown squash before, but it's one of my favourite vegetables, so I really don't know why.  This seed came from a squash I bought, and you never really know with bought vegetables whether the seeds will do anything, but in this case, they do, and did.  And then I'm having grilled butternut squash for my dinner this evening, from which I extracted this many seeds:

As you can see, I've laid them out to dry, after a quick rinse, just as I did with my first batch, from which today's shoot has sprouted.  It delights me that one vegetable can contain seeds from which might be grown one hundred more.  Let us fantasise about filling the world with squash.

Butternut squash, let us not forget, is precisely this colour:

Joy.

What more do you want from life than an abundance of squash?