Stuffed roast squash

Oh go on then, as I'm here, another quick one.

This was a road-test for the veggie option at our upcoming Christmas dinner with friends. It's adapted from a recipe I saw in a magazine. It was very festive and yummy. I'm tagging it as vegan although the version we ate wasn't, because the adapted version I make next time probably will be. It'll make sense when you've read it.

WHAT WE ATE

Roast squash stuffed with mushrooms, apples and cashew nuts, with roast potatoes and broccoli on the side. Here it is:



WHAT WE DID

You want one of those round-ish squashes that is sort of like a mini-pumpkin, except usually more colourful. Not sure a butternut squash would quite work in this context. One squash per person makes a fairly filling meal.

1. Slice the top off the squash and scoop the seeds and blurghy bits out the middle. Stick it in a roasting tray.
2. Slice a couple of handfuls of mushrooms, chop a small onion or leek, and chop an apple into chunks (I wedged them and then halved the wedges to make sure they'd fit into the top of the squash). Fry them in oil for 5 minutes or so, and add the cashews (no need to chop them or anything).
3. At this point I basically added a bit of a white sauce - ie, I added a spoon or two of plain flour, then added some milk a bit at a time (not very much, you don't want it too saucy or it all oozes out of the squash), and some seasoning and mixed herbs. However, I'm thinking it would actually be nicer with a white wine sauce, so next time I'm going to replace the milk with white wine, and give it a bit longer on the hob for some of the alcohol to evaporate off. This would make it vegan, assuming I suppose that you are either using vegan wine or aren't that fussy.
4. Spoon the mixture into the squash and replace the squash lid. Pop the whole thing in the oven for an hour on about 180C.

I've probably made this sound more complicated than it is, it is actually dead, dead easy - prep time around 15-20 minutes. And obviously you could stuff the squash with basically anything you like. This recipe really appeals to me as a way to make squash easy: I love squash, but am usually too lazy to use it, as anything that involves peeling or chopping it usually results in frustration and chopped fingers. The beauty of this is that you can just bung the whole thing in the oven and then scoop the flesh out as you eat. It looks great on the plate too.

Corn on the cob

Haven't updated this for a while, I know - we've been out/away/poorly quite a bit since creating it.

Today's dinner was hardly a culinary masterpiece but it gives me a chance to enthuse about our local farmers' market, and about farmers' markets in general - not only a way more fun and fulfilling shopping experience, but also make it ludicrously easy to make a tasty vegetarian meal without really even trying. The lady on the veg stall today told me that the corn we were buying had been picked this morning, and dammit you could taste that fact. And the little cardboard sign on the potatoes was not telling a lie when it said they were 'excellent roasted'.

WHAT WE ATE

- Corn on the cob (boiled for 6-8 mins then slathered with margarine, yum)
- Skin-on roast potatoes (little ones - cut into small-ish cubes, then sprinkled with mixed herbs, salt and pepper once in the roasting tray)
- Runner beans (sliced cross-ways and boiled for maybe 5 mins)

Grand total prep time probably about 10-15 minutes, total cost for two people around £2. And by god it was good.

A TEDIOUS NOTE

Being the tedious person that I am, I decided to test my theory that farmers' markets are almost always cheaper than supermarkets, so that I could feel smug about the bargains I got.

So. Today at the farmers' market I spent an unusually hefty £18 (which may or may not have been accurate, since they took the dangerous step of letting me add it up myself as I went along), for which I got:

Two punnets of plums, one of blackberries and one of blueberries; six eating apples and four cooking apples; two ears of corn; five white onions, one red onion, one bulb of garlic; one aubergine; one green pepper; one broccoli, one punnet of fresh peas, a bunch of runner beans; four tomatoes; one-and-a-half kilos of potatoes; six free-range eggs.

Here it is, in all its glory:


According to the Sainsbury's website (I did try Tesco, but it wouldn't let me unless I faffed about getting a Clubcard), this would have cost me £24.11 to buy there. Well, almost - I had to substitute blackcurrants for the blackberries, since apparently Sainsbury's aren't selling blackberries, despite the fact that they are falling off a bramble bush near you as I type. Tch.

Um, yeah. Farmers' markets! Yay!

Chickpea and Aubergine Tagine

I won't lie: the credit for this goes almost entirely to Mark. The honey and cinnamon was my idea though.

WHAT WE USED

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
spices to taste (we used about 1tsp each of cumin, coriander, cinnamon and turmeric, plus a pinch of chilli powder)
1 small aubergine, cubed
1 tin chickpeas
1 tin tomatoes
a handful of dried apricots, chopped into chunks
a squeeze of honey

WHAT WE DID

1. Fry off the onion and garlic in some vegetable/olive oil with the spices, till the onions are soft (about 5-10 mins).

2. Empty the tins of tomatoes and chickpeas into a second saucepan (including the chickpea water), and add the onion mix. Simmer it over a low heat.

3. Add some more oil to the first pan (the one that had the onions in) and use it to fry the aubergine till it's soft (around 15 mins). There should be some spice residue in the pan, making the aubergine yummy.

4. Tip the aubergine into the chickpea stew, give it a stir and leave it to simmer for basically as long as can be bothered.

5. Add the apricots and honey (we did this when it was nearly ready, but you could add it along with the aubergine to minimise faff).

WHAT WE ATE IT WITH

Cous cous (measured by volume, about 80ml each, soaked in about 250ml hot vegetable stock for 5 mins in a bowl with a lid over it)

Salad (mixed leaves and fresh chopped tomatoes; I made a quick dressing from mustard, oil & vinegar)

THINGS TO NOTE

Mark is a way more patient cook than me. I'd have just bunged the onions, garlic and aubergine all in together, fried them for about 5-10 minutes and then added the chickpeas/tomatoes/other stuff, thus saving time and washing up (but compromising a bit on yumminess). Either way, the actual prep time for the tagine shouldn't be more than about half an hour.

Edit: Mark is also way more picky than me. He points out that I have tagged this recipe as vegan even though it contains a squeeze of honey, and honey is technically not vegan. I could write a lengthy essay about why honey is not very relevant to the reasons I try to eat vegan (and the fact that most of my vegan friends seem to agree, and also treat it as acceptable), but obviously technically speaking I did, in fact, lie. This blog should probably come with a health warning that my definition of vegan is pretty, um, fluid. I will generally tag stuff as vegan if it has trace amounts of non-vegan stuff that you could easily omit if you were really that bothered.