bear with a wooden spoon

Spelt pasta bake with squash, mushrooms, broccoli and sage, a photo by bearwithaspoon on Flickr.

Butternut squash – it’s everywhere, isn’t it? Even in France and – more extraordinarily – in the Monoprix near the office on a Thursday evening. I’ve been itching to have a stab at cooking with it for a while, but where to start? So when I saw this recipe (you’ll have to scroll down a bit, I’m afraid) from Signe Johansen, the Scandilicious lady, and knowing that CB would be in need of some hearty autumn fare when he arrived Friday night, I decided to take the plunge. Peeling and chopping a butternut squash is more of an undertaking than I’d imagined, I must say. By the time I’d finished, I was already halfway down the (wonderful) bottle of Argentinian Syrah CB had bought, and I hadn’t even got the thing in the oven. Mercifully, the rest of the recipe was a doddle. Kale being an unknown quantity in France (I know, right?), I substituted some broccoli, which I steamed just a smidgin before throwing it in with the mushrooms. Oh and I also used chilli flakes because the real chilli I thought I had in the vegetable rack had gone AWOL. You don’t even have to use spelt pasta, though I did because I felt guilty about the kale. Now, I feel I should warn you that there’s an awful lot of this mutha, particularly when you add the pasta, so be generous with your seasoning, be it cheese, nutmeg, sage, salt or pepper. The upside is that it’s absolutely DEELISH, which is just as well as we’ll be eating it all weekend. Get peelin’!!

Posted on November 11, 2011 at 18:14 in homebaking   |  RSS feed |   Respond   |   Trackback URL