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My friend Sofia recently posted about her not following recipes. Coincidentally I was also planning on writing about food. Last week we bought the book Meat Free Any Day by the food writer Sarah Beattie. I first came across Sarah on twitter, where she is a very friendly tweeter. She has been writing about food for over 20 years, specifically vegetarian food. She has a regular column in Vegetarian Living magazine, and it is recipes from this that form the basis of this, her most recent book. We try not to have red meat more that twice a week so are always on the lookout for new veggie recipes. I’m really glad we got it. Like Sofia we also like to go off-piste when it comes to recipes, but it is always nice to have something to look at give you inspiration. Within 2 days we had cooked our first meal: a blue cheese and squash risotto. Sarah’s recipe is for 6 people so we made up quantities. Here is what we made (serves 2 hungry people):
1 small or 1/2 large Butternut squash cut into cubes, lightly oiled and roasted in the oven.
In a large frying pan gently sweat off a sliced leek in a butter and oil. Once it is nice and soft, put in 180grams of pearled spelt and let it get coated in the fat. Then pour in 200ml of white wine and let a good portion of it reduce. Keep adding spoonfuls of vegetable stock as the liquid cooks off until the spelt is cooked, it should take about 30minutes and 500ml of stock.
You want your butternut squash to get those nice crispy bits on it, but don’t forget about it in the oven whilst making the risotto and let it burn like I sometimes do.
Briefly steam off a little Cavelo nero.
When the spelt is cooked put throw in the Cavelo nero, butternut squash and some cubes of blue cheese. We went for a very creamy German cheese called Montagnolo Affine. We topped it off with some pea-shoots.
Here is the result:
Blue cheese and squash risotto
Made anything tasty recently?
pianolearner 
looks delish!
It really was. 🙂
Mmm, yum! This is the kind of meal that I cook on a regular basis, leaving red meat based meals for when my son is home from Uni. I hadn’t thought about using leeks in a risotto as I usually sweat off a couple of shallots but I did consider picking some ransoms as an alternative. I also add the butternut cubes at the start and let them cook in the stock but oven roasting along with some other veg would amp up the flavour. A new meat free combo I tried recently was squash, beans (black eye, borlotti, etc), spices such as cumin, coriander, cooked in stock and with fresh coriander and parsley chopped through. It came from the Hemsley sisters website, worth a look! Caro x
We’ve been eating a lot of beans recently. We really like the Epicure Black beans. Make great bean burgers. I’ve seen the Hemsley sisters in a magazine but never seen their site. Thanks I’ll check it out.
Thanks for the mention! Ah, squash, I nearly always have some squash sitting around, decorating my kitchen, and never ideas of what to do with it. This sounds delicious, I’m always up for blue cheese (and had never thought of putting them together). Lovely!
I didn’t used to like blue cheese, but the sweetness from the squash works really well with the blue cheese.
That looks, and sounds, rather good. I’m not a foodie and don’t have much sense of taste so my cooking tends to be basic. Cheers.
It was, thanks.
Mmmm speltotto! I love great veggie recipes, well, being (mostly) (95%) veggie I would. My most-used cookbook (even beating Nigella’s Domestic Goddess, which I have to say is *very* well-used) is Hugh F-W’s Veg Every Day, I just love it. It’s not a veggie book, but rather a book about vegetables which is therefore de facto veggie. Heartily recommended, and I will absolutely get Meat Free Any Day. I’m wary of blue cheese too, but just sometimes it really clicks, and that just looks scrumptious.
Mind you – I’ve just cunningly dealt with the aroma of boiled-over chickpeas by setting fire to the piece of kitchen towel I was using to swab the hob to get rid of the pong. So now my house smells of burnt paper. So – maybe don’t take my kitchen recommendations to heart??
We never bother with rice anymore, we always use spelt.
We have the Hugh book, but I’m terrible at forgetting to look in the ones I already have. Remind me to email you a fantastic split-pea fritter recipe. You will absolutely love it….
That would be lovely, I do like a split pea, and who can resist a fritter?? Do raid my email from here 🙂