Delicata Squash - Tempeh Saute

It's nice to be cooking again! I'm still not up to speed, but yesterday and today was able to eat some soup (plus watermelon). But we have a couple visiting from Illinois, friends of my wife's, and how could we welcome them with anything but good home cooking?! So, though I don't have an appetite to try it, I put together what I hope will be a tasty and interesting dish. Their flight is delayed, so I thought I would write about the dish and later upload the picture that I'll take.

I have always prepared winter squashes by baking, but today for the first time tried a saute. I asked my wife to do the hard work (while I rested to get ready for the effort) of peeling the squash (most winter squashes would be difficult to peel, but the delicata was not so bad). I cut it in half, the long way, removed the seeds and fibrous membranes, then cut each half into pieces between 1/4 and 1/2 inch wide.

I started [my wife just called - they just landed almost 3 hours late; I sent some snacks for them and will be ready with hot dinner plates when they get home in a half hour or so!] the squash sauteeing and enjoyed seeing how quickly it softened and cooked. A few minutes later, I added small chunks of tempeh and a little bit of diced yellow onion. A few minutes after that, I added some green bell pepper, small half-moons of red onion (adding ingredients like onions at different times of the cooking can yield interesting results), and a stalk of rosemary. The squash and tempeh were looking nicely browned and done soon thereafter; I added two kinds of hot sauce in moderation, and turned the heat off, waiting for their imminent arrival (I'll reheat a few minutes before they're due and add a little bit of salt and some freshly ground black pepper).

I'm also serving a salad with baby arugula, yellow bell pepper, avocado wedge, lime, a touch of organic tangelo zest, fresh oregano from my garden, and salt and pepper. Lundberg Farms Black Japonica short-grained black and medium-grained mahogany rices cooked with a vegan bouillon cube rounded out the meal. I hope that they'll like it and, if there is any left, I hope that I'm up to trying it tomorrow or Sunday. I'm off to finish the preparations!

[The meal seems to have been a success. I saved a few spoonfuls so I can try this dish hopefully tomorrow, but it looked good, and everybody said they enjoyed it. I hope to post pictures (I have one of dinner in-progress when I had posted earlier) soon, but picture posting seems to be suffering a technical difficulty right now.]