I felt so bad about forgetting to take pictures of the fish and chips, that I decided to give you some action shots of my next Experimental Thursday offering. It also gave me a chance to try and practice my food photography, which I will concede is currently pretty poor. I was looking back at the Scallops with Pea Pesto. That photo really does not come close to conveying how incredibly yummy that plate of food was. I have a lot to learn. Bear with me though and I will give it a go.
So, last Thursday, it finally felt properly like autumn. We woke to my favourite kind of autumn morning - beautiful bright sunshine in a cloudless, almost aquamarine sky, but deceptively crisp and fresh once outdoors. The kind of morning when you need a hat but a good cardigan (of which, as a knitter, I am pleased to say I have many) will suffice instead of a coat. Baby Bird and I headed to the park early in the morning and returned home chilled but not cold. After snuggling her down for a nice nap, I headed to the kitchen to steal a march on dinner (safe in the knowledge the freezer was already full of soup options for lunch).
Making dinner while Baby Bird is sleeping is infinitely easier than trying to contain or distract her while I make it when she is awake. It means that I can serve her meal within a few minutes of it being required later in the day, either by standing it in a bowl of hot water or reheating gently on the stove, rather than having to wait for a volcanically hot oven fresh meal to cool enough for her to eat. Plus it gave me a chance to properly road-test whether the latest Experimental Thursday meal is a candidate for becoming a family regular. With just two and a half people, meals need to either be capable of being made quickly and in small portions or capable of being reheated or frozen so that they can feed us for a couple of days. I find autumn lends itself to the latter kind of dish both in feel and in produce. Lasagne, casseroles, stews, gratins, bakes. All meals which could easily tip over into stodge; in fact, meals that should be a little stodgy, since the cold and the dark demand comfort and succour. All meals that benefit from the addition of the plethora of beautiful root vegetables that start to appear in our shops and markets as the nights draw in and we head towards the pumpkin's annual moment of glory.
So, with that in mind, and after rooting around in the fridge and pantry to see what needed eating up, I pulled out Leiths Vegetarian Bible. This is not a book I use often, and as I leafed through its many, many pages I simultaneously wondered and knew why. This is not food porn, like most of my favourite cookery books. There are no witty anecdotes, no unctious descriptions, but, most strikingly, there are no pictures. This is a serious, hardcore cookbook in the old-fashioned style. There is no celebrity chef's personality getting in the way of the food and no overtly preachy message. Instead there is page after page of things you can do with vegetables. There are salads, salsas, side dishes a plenty, but also page after page of dishes that would make any vegetarian house-guest sing your praises for years. Dishes that can rightly and legitimately claim to be complete in and of themselves, without any pesky animals intruding on the action. Looking at this book reminded me of why I loved being a vegetarian (back in the days when I did things properly and avoided fish) and why I should really make more of an effort to introduce Hubby to the wonders that can be achieved with a few veg and a little thought. So, I knew I didn't use this book more because I get caught up in salivating over the luscious photos and the oozing prose in many modern cookbooks, but I resolved to look beyond the window-dressing more regularly and explore this fabulous vegetarian encyclopaedia more often.
What did I come up with? Well, amongst the things lurking in the larder was a butternut squash. What could be more autumnal than the bright orange flesh of this lovely tasty veg? A gentle browse through the squash recipes yielded the Butter Bean and Butternut Bake on pg 320. Since discovering succotash in a baby food cookbook a couple of months ago, I have usually got a tin of butter beans in the house (I know I should probably by dried and soak them but I rarely plan far enough ahead for that - I have the same problem with chickpeas and other pulses so mostly go for tinned unless you can cook them from dried). As my eyes wandered down the list of ingredients, I got more and more excited. This is a bright, colourful dish which includes many of my favourite vegetables.
So, as you can see, we start with a base of celery and red onion. I love red onion, with its caramelised sweetness, and it pairs so well with the fresh, bright flavour of celery. And there, lurking in the background with the red pepper and garlic is one of my absolute favourite, but rarely used vegetables: fennel. I love the aniseedy zing of fennel, but hardly ever cook it as I don't really know what to do with it and find can all too easily overpower a dish. This is fine if you are cooking the fabulously cleansing fennel soup from Real Fast Vegetarian Food, since the fennel is the star of the show. I love to make up a batch of this if I'm feeling low and sluggish: it... ahem... moves things along and puts a real spring in your step. But I am wary of using it in casseroles and stews because, whenever I do, I struggle to balance the flavours, always using too much or so little you can't really taste it. Plus I don't really know what to do with the leftover fennel - it always strikes me as a whole or not at all kind of a veg.
Then you add to the lovely greens and purples of the fennel and onion, a big dose of flamey orange and red in the form of the butternut squash and a sweet red pepper. As I stirred the veg in a massive saucepan, gently sweating them, I couldn't help but think it looked like I had the view from that morning's trip to the park all mixed up in there. Gorgeous blazing leaves, stirred in with the now lush again grass and the last few summer flowers... I should probably read less poetry...
The best bit comes after you gently brown the veg, when you add stock and tomato purée, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. When you take the lid off to give it a stir, the most amazing fug hits you in the face. Warm, sweet and soothing, with an fresh aniseed top-note. This is like wearing an alpaca cardigan on a cold crisp morning - comforting and invigorating all at once.
After cooking the veg, you add the butter beans and the vermicelli noodles, season and pop it all in an ovenproof dish, covering it with some hard goat's cheese. I didn't have egg vermicelli in the fridge so made do with cooking some dried stuff that I did have in the pantry. I suspect the fresh would probably hold its shape better, but I would equally be tempted to use good old spaghetti instead.
The goat's cheese that I used was actually a semi-hard, namely the Norwegian Snofrisk. I hadn't tried this before but it was on special in Waitrose and I'm always a sucker for trying a new cheese. It melts nicely and browned well as you can see from the before and after shots, but I think perhaps the dish maybe needs something with a little more punch to cut through what is otherwise a very mellow dish. That, however, really is nit-picking about was a very tasty and wonderfully cosy supper, served (successfully) reheated along side some green beans and peas and enjoyed by the whole family (although, as often happens, in three separate sittings). The dish is complete in itself and even the carnivorous Hubby conceded that he didn't miss the meat. If you have a vegetarian friend coming for supper, be brave, be seasonal and serve this to the whole party. I really don't think anyone could be disappointed with this cheeringly colourful and wonderfully flavoursome dish. Hell, even if you are all confirmed meat-eaters, you might still enjoy it.
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