And it was all....yellow

Last week I had a chat with my mum, where we bemoaned the lack of current access to Marks & Spencer. When I was growing up, M&S was the "don't want to cook" option - either my dad would be phoned in the office and told to go there on the way home or, when we were teens, we'd be sent into town to get supplies (it was a 10-15 minute walk from the house I grew up in). This habit has carried over into adulthood, if we can't be bothered cooking then one of us will raid M&S in the station on the way home. This week especially, I was craving an M&S Chicken Kiev and I don't care how retro that is. As a minor comfort, my husband bought the posh ones from the supermarket, along with some other minimal cook things, so I've been doing less cooking this week whilst also enjoying a pleasing memory of the Before Times.

That meant that we had a slight panic over what to have for dinner tonight, no actual planning had been done for once so it was a "what do we have in" evening. I remembered seeing a Nigella recipe for Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato curry advertised this week, I have the relevant book (At My Table) and a quick check of the recipe revealed we had everything in, so that was it. It feeds 4-6, so now I also have leftovers.

Nigella says to roughly chop a red onion. I only had half a red onion, so it was that and half a new white one, very roughly chopped (yes, this is a ridiculous way of using onions), plus two cloves of garlic - the first two were quite small, so obviously I added two more. The recipe told me that i should mix these and the spices together with a stick blender, but I chucked them in the food processor instead along with:
1 teaspoon of turmeric
1 teaspoon of ground coriander
1/2 a teaspoon of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of chilli flakes (It's meant to be fresh chilli, but I didn't have any)
1 teaspoon salt
I also forgot to add the fresh ginger at this stage - instead I chucked a teaspoon of ground ginger in a bit later and stirred optimistically. Blend this lot to a paste.

Heat two tablespoons of oil (Nigella says coconut oil or vegetable oil - I used standard olive oil) in a fairly big pan and gently cook the paste for a couple of minutes. Open a tin of Coconut Milk and spoon out the solid bit into the pan, stir this round for a couple of minutes before adding:
The rest of the Coconut Milk
1 tin chopped tomatoes
350 ml vegetable stock
500g chopped sweet potato
1kg chopped butternut squash
My butternut squash came out of the freezer, so the next stage of bringing this lot to boil took what felt like AGES. Once it boils, turn it down to a gentle simmer and leave for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Check everything is cooked (surprisingly the frozen squash cooked faster than the sweet potato) and leave to rest for 10 minutes before eating with rice and garnished with fresh coriander - if you have it. Coriander is one of the herbs I'm trying not to kill in the garden at the moment, so we did. We even had a lime in the fruit bowl for the recommended wedge to serve alongside.

Whilst it was cooking, I did the washing up. The blade bit and body of the food processor have yellow stains. My wooden spoon has yellow stains. The bit of my (normally white) counter whereto sauce splashed when I stirred too vigorously is yellow. Dinner was quite yellow/orange. I poured another glass of wine (not yellow) and tried to get that Coldplay song out of my head.