Squash Butter and Maple Toffee Naan

Sometimes you get this grand plan for dinner, the type of dinner that warrants a lovely dessert to follow. But you get so caught up in making the dinner that dessert becomes irrelevant until you're done making the dinner and you're left thinking, "Shit. Now what?" We were lucky to come up with this one from extra bread dough and stuff in the freezer. I recommend many pumpkin pies in the fall, but save some purée for something like this.

Squash Butter and Maple Toffee Naan
The first step is to make the naan dough. I had great results with Food Network's recipe. As with any yeast bread, mix the dough an hour or a few ahead of time to allow it to rise. Skip the fennel and other seeds since you want a plain bread dough for this. And if you happen to not have yogurt, as I didn't, don't fret. I substituted around 5 T of heavy cream for the yogurt portion, but I get the feeling water or milk will work equally well.

Also, I used a whole packet of yeast and only let it rise once since I'm not keeping around a partially-used packet and I can never time bread right.

Squash Butter
~2 C puréed squash***
~3 T honey
1 broken cinnamon stick
0.5 tsp ground allspice
0.5 tsp ground black pepper
0.5 tsp nutmeg

Combine in a saucepan and allow to reduce over the lowest heat, stirring consistently, until the mixture thickens and you can smell the spices. Then turn the heat off. Nice and easy.

***If you've never prepared your own squash purée before, DO IT. It's truly flavorful, fresh and bright, MANY times better than the canned stuff. Pick a day when you don't have that much to do so it doesn't suck washing the food processor and cutting into these hulking fruits. Round up some Butternuts, Long Island Cheese Pumpkins, Blue Hubbards, or other roasting squash, cut (or saw, if necessary) them into chunks, and roast at 350 F until the flesh separates from the skin easily with a fork. Purée the flesh in the food processor until smooth, then fill into Ziploc bags and freeze until you're ready to use it!

And for cooking, never use those orange jack-o-lantern pumpkins which are Connecticut Field Pumpkins. The flesh is stringy and super bland, they're only for decoration.

Putting It Together
1. Put your oven up to 450 F.
2. Grease a cookie sheet
3. Grab a big handful of dough, stretch out into a long strip, and spread on a liberal amount of squash butter.  
4. Twist the buttered strip over itself, so it encases the filling. Don't stress over this, think 'rustic' and just go with it.
5. Repeat until you use up the dough and squash butter. Save the saucepan for the toffee!
6. Bake for about a half hour, until the bread is toasty and golden brown.

Maple Toffee
In the same saucepan you cooked the squash butter in, combine:
~3 T butter
~3 T sugar
~3 T maple syrup
and cook over low heat until it combines, bubbles, and looks all lovely.

And when the naan is done, drizzle the toffee on top and have a nice time eating it.