Clean-out-your-fridge pasta

For reasons I shall remain mysterious about, I've been madly eating my way through my fridge. For other reasons, I've been eating my way through my pantry and freezer (you can't put more delicious stuff in your freezer if it's already full of other delicious stuff, so you either have to eat what's there or get a deep freeze) (that's next).

Here's what I spotted earlier today:
Pantry: much garlic, many onions, pint of grape tomatoes
Fridge: random roasted squash and sweet potatoes

Looking at these odds and ends, I was reminded of a delicious pasta I made before and decided to roll with it. But I also needed to get rid of all those onions. So while getting my caffeine fix (the burr grinder is awesome, mom!), I chopped up some onions and threw them in a pot with some oil to sweat it out on med-low for several hours (I set the timer to stir every fifteen or so).

By noontime, I've got me a mess of caramelized onions (half of which I threw in the freezer for later). You can see that this is only the kind of recipe that is "quick" if you have half of the ingredients prepped already (but it's all stuff that's easy to do while you're doing other things).

So here's what you do:

1. Roast one squash, one sweet potato, and as much garlic as you'd like earlier in the week.
2. Caramelize onions (earlier in the day, earlier in the week, whatever).
3. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Salt it. Add the pasta (I'm obsessed with Mafalda corta - it's flat pasta, about an inch long, with frilly edges that is totally charming and that takes about eight-ten minutes to cook).
4. Meanwhile... chop garlic (or not) and fry it up with your cherry tomatoes (I halved them for kicks, but that's unnecessary).
5. When the garlic starts to turn golden and the tomatoes start losing their juice, add the (cold) squash and sweet potato. Actually, you could probably do this at any point. Also, if you've already got your caramelized onions, throw them in at any time. Now your "sauce" is good to go.
6. Drain the pasta (reserving some of the pasta water just in case).
7. Add the pasta to the "sauce" and add as much pasta water as you'd like (I used about half a cup).
8. Add cheese. I juiced it up with a really nice parm I picked up a while back, but if you had goat cheese (the original cheese used in the original recipe) that would work fine too. Manechgo? I can't see why not. Use what you've got (within reason - no blue).
   

Enjoy.