Don’t you love it when you suddenly come across a whole new
way of doing things you love? I’m talking about cooking, but I suppose the same
could be said for anything you love – a new author with a backlist you can read
your way through, a new band if that’s your thing, a different version of a
sport you love. As you’ll be aware by now, I’m rather in love with Anna Jones’
fabulous book The Modern Cook’s Year
and I’ve yet to make a recipe of hers I didn’t like. But the thing that’s new
to me and that I want to make again and again in all the iterations she can
show me involves a whole lot of unlikely vegetables roasted in the oven, along
with some type of cheese that’s also oven-baked.
A few weeks ago we discovered
spring vegetable stew with baked ricotta. We’ve had that three times now –
including once this week because Elspeth hadn’t tried it yet. This week we tried
flash-roasted green veg, which was little lettuces again, along with spring
onions, red onion, radishes – yes, radishes – and whole broad bean pods, topped
with baked feta and roasted chickpeas. I’m sorry, I was too keen to get stuck
in to remember to take a photo, but to be honest, it wasn’t all that pretty,
but goodness, it was delicious. The broad beans I got from the supermarket were
far too old and tough, but even so, once you’d pulled off the worst of the
stringy part, they were good. The radishes lost their pepperiness but retained
their crunch. The chickpeas had a different sort of crunch. The feta, baked
with a topping of paprika and lemon rind was a pleasing creamy, sharp contrast
to the rest. Pure genius if you ask me. It’s not that I haven’t roasted
vegetables before, just that I generally roast the same things time and again –
peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, onion, garlic, sometimes leeks. Anna Jones has
opened my eyes to all sorts of other possibilities, and shown me how to add
bells and whistles that lift oven-roasted veg to a new level. I’m planning to
work my way through every oven-roast veg recipe in her book. In fact, I’m quite
tempted just to start at the early summer recipes and work my way through every
recipe in the book as the seasons pass.
The recipe I did remember to photograph, shown above, is
also an Anna one. That wins all the prizes for prettiness. It’s spaghetti with
squash polpette, little balls made from squash with fennel, ricotta and
lentils, baked to a crisp in the oven and served with spaghetti with a
pistachio pesto. The polpette fell apart as soon as you began to eat, but no
matter, the crisp crumbs were lovely with the pasta. Robert thinks there should
have been more sauce, but I quite like a dish where the pasta itself is part of
the point rather than just a background to the sauce.
You can find the complete menu from week fifteen 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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