Sweet Harvest Potato Pies/Pancakes with Squash, Carrots, Apples & Onion

This is the god damn best thing I've made in a while.  Holy hell.  I was inspired by Justbento.com 's Oyaki potato dumpings.  Of course, because I don't eat meat, I had to fill them with something else - and I had been thinking about squash and carrots, and apples and onions - subsequently I decided that they would all go quite nicely together!!!

Sweet Harvest Potato Pie/Pancakes
1 acorn squash
2 carrots
1 sweet onion
2 apples
1 pkg mash potato mix
6 Tbsp corn starch or so
salt
brown sugar
maple syrup
cinnamon
fenugreek
coriander powder
olive oil
rosemary

1. Cut up the squash.  This was the most unpleasant part.  There has to be a better way to do this.  Maybe if I cooked it first and then cut it up, it wouldn't be so bad.  I worried the entire time that I was going to cut a finger off.

2. Cut up the carrots and put them a foil-lined pan with the squash.  Drizzle with olive oil, a little salt, brown sugar, maple syrup, rosemary, cinnamon - whatever.  Mix it up a little.  Bake at 400 for a while ~20 min?  I dunno.

3.  Chop and saute up the onion until it starts getting translucent.  Throw in the chopped apples.  Cook until the apples are soft.  Put some cinnamon, salt, fenugreek, and coriander powder on there.  

4.  When the apples are soft, put the onion and apple mix in with the squash and carrots, which would be getting softish at this point.  Mix and bake together until the squash and carrot are soft, to your liking.  Turn it up to 425 and bake for 10 min, I'm guessing.

5.  At some point, you will want to mix up your instant mashed potatoes, however it tell you to.  Try not to eat too much of it before you start adding the corn starch.  Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing, so I just was adding corn starch and mixing without measuring until it seemed sort of dough like.  It also helps if you cool the mashed potatoes down a bit?

6.  Make flatish patty like potato thingys, and when your squash mixture is done - spoon some into the center and pull the dough over it to cover and make a dumpling!!!  Add some olive oil to the frying pan and fry until the potato is brown.  It helps not to check on the potato too often, otherwise the browning part will flake off instead of staying on your dumpling.  Serve with maple syrup.  Amazing.

7.  Alternatively, you could add a little water to your dough and make potato pancakes!  (This sort of happened by accident, but it all worked out)  Serve with your squash mixture and drizzled with maple syrup.

SOO.. In my opinion, cooking onions with apples is the yummiest way to eat an onion.  Forget about the apples, the onions are SOOO good.  Maybe if you cook onion with apple juice or sauce, or apple cidar vinegar, you would get the same effect.  ANYWAY, that dumpling was positively the best thing I've made in a while.  SOOOOOO good.

(Sorry I take crappy food pictures.  Ha)