Pasta and Bread

I've been in sort of a cooking funk recently, but two of my friends were coming over tonight and I knew I needed to come up with something.  I don't typically do pasta dishes for guests, but like I said, cooking funk, so I made Mark Bittman's multi-grain pasta with butternut squash and ground lamb.

The recipe calls for packaged cubed butternut squash, which baffles me for a lot of reasons.  Can't someone just do some of the tedious prep work the night before instead of wasting money?  Cripes.  Order take out or cook for real.  Anyway, I didn't take any pictures, but my friend Chris did so maybe I will post those another time.  The dish was pretty delicious and hearty, and the flavors were described as "subtle."  I could tell with Adam's first bite he was wishing it was covered in a heap of tomato sauce.  This is not that kind of pasta dish - how could it be with cinnamon and cumin?

I served it with some homemade bread from the Master Recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which is a recent addition to my culinary library.

After Meredith asked me to start blogging here, I realized I liked writing about food a lot and started my own blog called The Pineapple Spoon Rest.  I recently wrote a very brief entry about the sham that is bread in five minutes a day. After baking and eating mini-boules three nights in a row, I can say it's delicious, but five minutes?  PLEASE. I read the introduction for the book after I got in the mail, and already forgot what it said (oops), so maybe it described what they actually meant by five minutes (the ease in having fresh bread once you make the initial recipe and can lob off chunks of dough while you're prepping the real dinner), but I don't get how twenty minutes of preheating/dough resting and half an hour of baking equal five minutes.  They should rename the book Easy Artisan Bread and call it a day, and then I would be a lot less agitated.