Roasted butternut squash and mushroom lasagne

Fancied a bit of a veggie treat this weekend, and this is one of my favourites. It’s pretty different to a normal lasagne!

The first job is to sort out the butternut squash. Put on the oven to preheat at around 180 degrees. The best advice I could give for squash is to use a really big knife! Peel, deseed and chop up the squash into cubes. Put a little vegetable oil and some salt and pepper on and put it in the oven for half an hour. 

Whilst that’s cooking, chop up some mushrooms (I used the best part of a standard supermarket packet!) and fry them on a high heat. I then put a couple of cloves of garlic in the pestle and mortar with a little salt, a little olive oil and a handful of fresh parsley, mushed it up until it resembled a sort of pesto, and added it to the mushrooms.  You don’t have to do this, I more or less did because I have a new pestle and mortar I wanted to play with, but it was nice! 

I soaked some dried mushrooms in a little boiling water for ten minutes then added them too. (Porcini mushrooms are the nicest, but I used Portobello because they’re cheaper! Not quite as tasty though) After they’ve cooked for a minute or two, add the water the mushrooms soaked in. About two tablespoons of double cream, and a good tablespoon of crème fraiche makes them pretty tasty. Add a good dose of salt and pepper.

 (it's very green because of the parsley pesto)

Then make a béchamel sauce, by mixing together flour and butter over a low heat and SLOWLY mixing in milk. I will confess that I managed to totally screw up my béchamel tonight! I added the milk too quickly and then wasn’t paying attention and it went a bit curdled and manky… I promise it’s the first time in years that’s happened! I started again, and followed my own instructions… and it was perfect. Then mix in some grated cheese to thicken it up. Your squash will be cooked by now so take it out of the oven!

If you were doing this for a dinner party or anything you could prepare most of the bits in advance, and assemble later.

You need quite a lot of sauce, as this is going to be the main cooking liquid for the lasagne sheets. About three quarters of a pint of milk. 

I recently had a conversation at work where more than one person said they would ALWAYS cook lasagne sheets before using them, even if the packet said you didn’t have to. I have to say, I really don’t bother. There’s enough faffing around in this recipe without that to deal with too! I don’t mind the occasionally crunchy corner, and as long as there’s enough liquid to cook them it doesn’t make too much difference.

 Then layer it all up. I go for:

Fresh spinach, roasted squash, then half the mushroom mixture. Then a layer of lasagne, and the same again. I’m not too fussy about making sure there are absolutely no gaps in the lasagne sheets. When I put the white sauce on top I want it to dribble through a bit to help cook everything evenly. The top layer should be lasagne then pour the sauce over the top. A bit of grated cheese and some salt and pepper, and it’s ready to go in the oven, for about forty minutes. 

Whilst in the oven, have a glass of wine and make a salad. Then it’s all done! I love this dish, and I don’t miss meat in it at all. Cheap and really tasty.

This weeks soup: Leek and potato again.

Whilst making this I mostly listened to: Monsters of Folk. A colleague recently purchased this, and has let me borrow it while he’s on holiday. Seems only fitting whilst making a hippy-ish veggie meal I should also listen to hippy-ish music.

Fish pie and egg poaching

So it’s the weekend before payday, and I spent five days in Scotland last week eating and drinking. This means I am absolutely skint, and trawling the freezer to see what we could eat this weekend! I realised we had basically all the ingredients for a fish pie, and even better might have enough to cook for some friends too…

I also have duck eggs, courtesy of a nice man at work who keeps ducks and hens and brings in the eggs. So the sort-of-dinner-party recipe is:

-          Poached duck egg salad with bacon bits and balsamic dressing

-          Fish pie

-          Loads of wine

Fish pie is a bit laborious, but worth it. It always feels to me a bit of a treat and very comforting. The key thing is to have a good variety of fish. In our freezer we had some pollock, a tiny bit of salmon, and some prawns.  I bought a piece of smoked haddock to go with it (smoked fish adds loads of flavour to fish pie, it’s a must).

Put some potatoes on for mash.

All the fish except the prawns goes in a big tub with a bay leaf and some peppercorns and gets covered with milk, then goes in the microwave for 4 minutes or so to poach lightly. It needs to be only just cooked, and pulling apart quite easily. 

Meanwhile, de-vein the prawns. Basically there’s a manky looking black line on prawns that is their intestinal tract or something (bleurgh). Thankfully, a quick scrape with the point of a sharp knife gets rid of it. 

Scatter your prawns into your pie dish, and pull the fish apart into chunks and distribute it fairly evenly. You don’t want any skin or anything. I also add some spinach leaves for a bit of extra veggie goodness, but you can leave it out if you’re not bothered.

Then make the sauce by stirring together some butter and flour over a medium heat, and gradually adding the milk you cooked the fish in. (Basically a classic white sauce, but it tastes all fishy and good). Add a load of chopped parsley and some chopped chives and the juice of half a lemon. Season with salt and pepper, then pour over the fish. Should look a bit like this:

 Mash the spuds with butter and milk then spread over the top. I tried something different with this pie, and blitzed up some bread with some herbs and salt and pepper to give it a nice crust on top. (Got the idea from a Nigel Slater article I think). It worked a treat!

(Not to blow my own trumpet but one slightly pissed guest said the fish pie was “awesome”)

Ready to go in the oven for about 30/40 minutes at 200 degrees. Should end up looking a bit like this (perhaps slightly less blurry. May have had a G and T by this point...):

For the starter, I fried off some bacon-y bits. I was going to buy pancetta or streaky bacon slices but my butcher gave me tail end bits of bacon for free, so I wasn’t about to complain! A salad of spinach, chives and radishes, then a lovely poached duck egg, and some bits of bacon. After the bacon has fried off, I put it on some kitchen paper to drain, and added some balsamic to the pan to deglaze it for the dressing with a bit of lemon juice.

Poaching eggs is a bit of a dark art, and it’s in the hands of the gods whether it works out or not. Lots of boiling hot water with a touch of vinegar in it is the key, break the egg into a cup or saucer so you can make sure it stays whole, swirl the water around and drop it in. Then hope for the best. They don’t take long, just a couple of minutes for a nice soft centre. Take out of the water with a slotted spoon and let them drain really well; no one wants vinegar-y water on their dinner. I’d never poached four eggs at once before, and decided just to go for it and see what happened. By some fluke it worked!

Awesome! I’ve been having a 6music and sunshine based weekend, hope you have too.