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| This is the most delicious thing we had to eat last week. It's squash and fennel lasagne from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg Everyday. |
We're trying every lasagne recipe we can get our hands on because we - especially Livia - are very fond of lasagne. Livia has had lasagne for her birthday dinner every year since she was old enough to make a request, so with her next birthday next month we have to find the perfect substitute to the classic meat lasagne. Lasagne was the one dish that made her slightly doubt her capacity to stick to a veggie diet, and it was top of her must-do list when we went to Rome last year! I think she would be quite happy to carry on experimenting with a new lasagne every week.
Anyway, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's squash and fennel lasagne is divine. It's rich and flavourful, melt-in-the-mouth roasted squash, plus a bit of bite from the fennel. (I realise as I write this that fennel is featuring quite strongly in our current diet - I'm very fond of fennel.) I think it might need baking a little more than we did as the pasta was slightly undercooked. It looked right when I took it out of the oven, but I suppose the other ingredients contained less moisture than some other recipes. Anyway, try it - it's absolutely delicious.
I was less sure about this mushroom calzone from Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
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| Mushroom calzone proved a bit ... worthy. |
The trouble with vegetarian food from way back in the age of tie-dye and hippies is that it does also tend to be crossed with 'wholefood'. I don't entirely understand that concept of wholefood is all about, but it seems to be attempting to find a kind of food purity. I can understand rejecting processed foods in favour of less processed ones but in addition to substituting wholemeal flour wherever possible these recipes seem to be designed to eschew 'luxury' by stripping away eggs and cream and butter. I suppose this is in pursuit of healthy eating, but really, what's more natural than eggs, cream and butter?
I'm not saying wholemeal flour is something I'd never use. A nutty wholemeal pastry works in some contexts. But in a calzone? It's a sort of pasty made by folding a filling inside a pizza dough. So what you're doing in this recipe is making wholemeal pizza dough. I should have known better. I made the dough as instructed and it just sat there in the bowl looking lifeless. It did rise a little but it had almost no stretch when time came to roll it out. No, no, no! The filling, on the other hand, was delicious, mushrooms and herbs in cream cheese and lemon juice with some breadcrumbs to hold them together. So I'll do it again, but no more wholemeal pizza dough for me!
You can find the complete menu from week nine here.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
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