Judging by the number of pumpkins that can now be seen adorning farmhouse roofs and outbuildings, I guess pumpkin season has well and truly arrived.

I know you can buy it all year round, but I think of pumpkin as a winter vegetable – in fact I haven’t bought any since about last April, so I’m just about ready to start cooking it again.

The ‘new kid on the block’, although it has been around for a couple of years or more, is butternut squash, the pale orange-skinned American variety, oval with a bulbous end and deep orange flesh. All varieties of pumpkin or hard-skinned gourds are known as winter squash in the US and there are a number of them including butternut, buttercup, acorn, turban and the giant hubbard to name just a few. Zucchini or other thin-skinned varieties are referred to as summer squash.

I’ve tried butternut in a couple of these recipes and it works well. It’s easy to peel using a potato peeler, and it’s not quite so fibrous as pumpkin. But as it’s about four times the price of pumpkin, I don’t know that it’s altogether worth it.

Pumpkin and sage risotto is a classic but, like everything else, other ingredients seem to be creeping in. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to risotto, so I just use the traditional ingredients, but this I time substituted butternut for the pumpkin. It held its shape nicely during cooking and did not disintegrate at all.

Next, I used butternut in the little lasagne. My husband is not a great pasta lover and I’m not a huge fan of fish, so when he has fish I often make these open lasagne for myself.

Individually, they make a great starter, but you can of course make it in one big dish if you prefer. They are also quite accommodating in that the component parts can be prepared in advance and put together at the last minute.

They can also be made completely in advance, in which case, instead of grilling them, bake them in the oven for about 20 minutes. For this recipe I cut the squash quite small, and I did wonder whether it would end up as mash, but again, it held up quite nicely.

Made with pumpkin and walnuts, the muffins make a nice teatime or after-school treat, especially if you add a cream cheese frosting. They are nicest eaten fresh from the oven, although they will keep for a day or two in an airtight container, but keep the cream cheese-frosted ones in the fridge.

Pumpkin features in dessert at most Thanksgiving dinners in the US, usually in pies but often in cheesecakes. My cheesecake with its nutty biscuit crust and creamy filling would, though I say it myself, be a fitting finale to any one of those festive occasions.