BUTTERNUT SQUASH STUFFED WITH COUSCOUS, FETA AND OLIVES

Mmmmm some very phallic squash there!

Ingredients:

• Cous Cous (we just used some flavoured stuff from Aldi)
• Black Olives
• Red Onion
• Garlic
• Feta
• Olive oil
• Cheese, any hard cheese.
• Quorn mince
• and obviously butternut squash

I know, I never do amounts, but honestly, this is cooking, not baking. It's not a precise science, so honestly, use as much as you have/want.

1. Preheat the oven to 190°

2. Scrub the squash clean and cut it in half.

3. Scoop out the seeds and stringy shit and get rid of that. Then scoop enough flesh out to make a cavity, leaving some to line the sides though. Like in the picture.

4. Put in an oven dish and oil em up! Add some salt and pepper too, or even rub them with garlic if that sounds sexy to you.

5. Bake them until they're nice and tender.

6. Cook the couscous and fry the mince

7. Chop up some red onion, garlic and olives, and crumble some feta. Put all of that in a bowl.

8. When the couscous and mince are done, add those. Also add the squash flesh. Add salt and pepper to taste.

9. When the squash is tender and ready, stuff it with the mixture.

10. Grate some cheese of your choice on top, and stick em in the oven for another 15 minutes!

PASTA BAKE WITH SPINACH TROTTOLE, ROMANESCO AND GOATS CHEESE BECHAMEL SAUCE

So our entertainment today was going to a big supermarket and looking at every. single. thing. Especially in the section with worldwide stuff. We spent AGES there, picking up everything and being like "Pomegranate molasses!! What could we use that for? OH MY GOD IT'S FROM LEBANON! I WANT IT!" So much for keeping it local. Oh well, what can I say, I'm a big arabophile. (Pah! Apparently that isn't even a word! It got underlined in red by the spell checker! How racist. Haahaaa)

ANYWHO, we sort of realised it was all too expensive in the end, so we made this:

I've personally never had trottole pasta before, but it's basically very large spirals. Yummeh.

Ingredients:

• Spinach Trottole (about 3 handfulls, don't use to much of this stuff, it gets really big)
• Quorn mince (2 handfulls)
• Romanesco Brocolli cut into smallish pieces
• Garlic - 3 cloves (!)
• Shallots
• Onion
• Fresh rosemary

1. Cook the pasta and romanesco brocolli (in the same pot, why not?) Also, add a good amount of salt to the water, this pasta needs it to taste of anything.

2. Fry the mince with some garlic and onion. This Quorn mince isn't particularly flavourful so you do have to add some salt and pepper.

3. Mix all this together and put it in a casserole dish

THE SAUCE

Ingredients:

• Milk
• Butter
• Flour
• Salt & Pepper
• Chopped rosemary
• Cheddar (or any kind of cheese you want)
• Goat's cheese

4. Preheat the oven to 160°

5. Melt butter in a small saucepan on low heat. Just enough butter to cover the base of the pan.

6. Keep adding small amounts flour and milk alternately, whilst stirring the entire time, until the sauce is as thick or thin as you want it. We made it quite thick. While you're doing this, don't let it boil.

7. Add the cheeses and turn up the heat so they melt into the sauce, keep stirring!

8. Let it simmer for a minute, et voila!

9. Pour it over the stuff in the casserole dish as evenly as you can

10. Grate some cheese on top (we used cheddar and red leicester).

11. Put it in the oven for 20-30 minutes!

HOME BAKED FOCACCIA AND ROASTED SWEET POTATO AND GARLIC SOUP

Sooo since it's been so cold and rainy, I thought it was time for some autumnal comfort food!

This was the first time I baked bread, so I think it turned out pretty okay! It was a little too dense though.. I used too much flour and didn't let the dough rise enough. Poo. It was super yummy anyway, and this is what you get when you type focaccia into google:

Sooo.... serious win! :D Next time I'll use more salt, less flour, more olive oil, let it rise longer and spread it out thinner.

Gaaaah damn blogger keeps rotating my photos!

So the soup was delicious but the texture was something like baby food.... I don't know what I was thinking. I think there is a lesson to be learned here: LEAVE THE COOKING TO SAM.

Ingredients:

2 sweet potatoes

1 big normal potatoes

4 cloves of garlic

olive oil

1 cup of warmed milk

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 250°

2. Cook potatoes until almost tender

3. Drain and place on baking tray with unpeeled garlic cloves

4. Drizzle with olive oil and stick in oven

5. Roast for 5 minutes (this was my mistake, I roasted the hell out of them, making them gluey)

6. Squeeze the garlic from it's skin into a bowl or food processor

7. Add potatoes and milk and either puree using one of those puree sticks or blitz it all in the food processor.

8. Add salt and pepper to taste.

WILD MUSHROOMS ON TOAST, PURPLE SPROUTING BROCCOLI AND ROAST VEGETABLES

Another super yummy meal made by Sam!!

Pretty simple this time, to ensure the best flavours of the mushrooms are not spoilt or over-complicated. Just Puffballs and Parasols on toast. I fried them in the classic combination of garlic, shallots and butter, and turned up the heat at the end to make the fat puffball chunks nicely crispy.

Purple Sprouting Broccoli. I didn't even know you could get it before spring. Just tastier and sweeter than normal fatty broccoli. But still not as good as the fancy pants successful artist of the family (that cunt Romanesco).

And here just some roasted vegetables: butternut squash, sweet potato, shallots, courgette, parsnip, carrot and garlic cloves. Covered in a mix of vegetable and garlic oil, with some rosemary sprinkled over!

We LOVE roasting unpeeled garlic cloves, and then squeezing the gooey, creamy garlic out of the peel.... mmmmmmmm NOM.

SPAGHETTI WITH WILD MUSHROOM SAUCE, CHICKEN AND AVOCADO

SO here we have a very quaint looking basket of wild mushrooms I picked near Norwich Prison. That should be a clue enough as to where I was foraging, it's got a typically nonsensical Norfolk name. Ok yeah so we have a few Boletes, some beautiful Orange Grisettes (which my most trusted mushroom book told me were poisonous. But they aren't actually. They're pretty fucking tasty!) and a nice parasol. This was the first time I've ever found Grisettes, and there were hundreds of them.

OH HOW PRETTY, THAT'S OBVIOUSLY EXACTLY HOW THE MUSHROOMS HAPPENED TO FALL ONTO MY CHOPPING BOARD. Boletes and Orange Grisettes.

Yeah. Slices of Mushrooms. Parasols at the back, Boletes round the edge and Grisettes in the middle.

More attempts at me taking arty photos of chopped up mushrooms. Congratulations.

The finished meal. Yeah looks a bit grey and rusty but it tasted incredible. The avocado and mushrooms worked so well together, but the spaghetti was a bit unnecessarily slimy with the sauce. Potatoes would have been a better choice.

Sooo now that Sam got to write about his beloved mushrooms, I'm left with the fun task of writing out the recipe.

I won't do amounts though for the solid ingredients, use as much as you like.

Ingredients:

Wild mushrooms (or if you're not as adventurous, you can go play-foraging in the supermarket, where the mushrooms grow in a plastic tub near the vegetables)

Quorn chicken pieces

Olive oil

Garlic (we used three cloves)

250ml chicken stock

250ml cream

1 tbs mustard

Pasta or spaghetti, whatever you like

Avocado(s)

1. Fry the chicken in some olive oil. Season it with salt and pepper.

2. Remove chicken from pan and replace with mushrooms and garlic.

3. Cook those mushrooms until they're just tender, but not too mushy

4. Add the stock, cream, mustard and chicken. Make sure it's boiling gently and let it reduce until it's thick enough.

5. In the meantime, cook the pasta.

6. Slice some avocado into smallish chunks.

7. When the pasta is done, toss it all together, et voila!

This is a good dish if you like really creamy pasta things. We decided we would have preferred it without the sauce, but it's your decision.

SPINACH AND FETA FRITTERS

We stole this recipe from one of our favourite blogs, Closet Cooking.

http://closetcooking.blogspot.com/2010/07/spinach-and-feta-fritters.html

We change the recipe a little though, we use more than a 1/2 cup of feta cheese, and THEN we add some soft goats cheese. Oh hell yes. We also add some chopped garlic, because without garlic it wouldn't actually be food. That's our logic anyway.

Ours don't look as pretty, but they taste amazing. I could eat these for lunch everyday.

Oh and don't say, feta? That's not cheap! That's super shmancy! Well, we buy ours from Aldi for less than £1 a block.. it's even cheaper if you get the fake kind.

CHEESY BREAKFAST

Yeah, it's really corny to serve ones boyfriend heart-shaped shit for breakfast, but ya gotta show de bwai your love.