Funny week, funny pasta

 

It’s been a funny old week. The vaccine news should have made me deliriously happy, but somehow it doesn’t really seem to be sinking in. It’s partly that the wait to actually get the jab will be agonising, but also the feeling that I now need to be more careful, partly because getting Covid now would be deeply frustrating, but also because all of those people who haven’t taken it seriously, or who have stopped doing so, will no doubt be idiot-ing all over the place, acting like it’s all over. Which it clearly isn’t, as  a glance at the infections rates where we are in Kent (Tier 3 – what more sensible countries have called ‘red zones’) will tell you. Even with the first doses of the vaccine winging their way from Belgium to the UK as I write, it’s still going to be a long winter. Still, hopefully this is the beginning of the end.

Rant/therapy session over. Let’s get onto the food. I seem to have slightly lost my mojo recently, in cooking terms. I haven’t done anything exciting, cooking has mostly felt like a chore. Anything interesting has been mentally filed away, in the ‘I might make that over Christmas’ section. Meal planning has also been more of a scramble. It’s perhaps this latter issue that somehow resulted in me deciding to make a particularly weird sounding Ottolenghi recipe (on a Wednesday, there’s something weird happens to my cooking  on Wednesdays): roasted squash with pasta in a warm yoghurt sauce.  Apparently pasta in yoghurt sauce is a thing in the Middle East. Francesca may wish to look away now…

First, peel, chop and roast the squash, along with some wedges of onion, for – theoretically – half an hour. I say theoretically, because he says to do them at 230 degrees fan, which is hot, and mine were done long before that point. Fortunately this wasn’t a total surprise, as I thought this sounded a bit weird, so I was able to speed everything else up.

While your squash is roasting, you can make the other bits of the dish. Because this is Ottolenghi, so there must be complications. Chop some garlic, then fry in olive oil until brown and crisp. Put to one side, and retain the garlicky oil.

The next task is to make the sauce. Now this is where things get weird. The recipe says that it is for two people, but calls for a kilogram of squash. That’s quite a lot. My perfectly reasonably sized squash was about half that, so that’s what I did. The yoghurt sauce called for 500g of yoghurt (a big tub) and two egg yolks, which again, seemed like a lot. I decided to make half (I also did less pasta than in the recipe, because it was the end of a packet – 130g instead of 200g, which is at least a reasonable amount for two people), which in the end worked absolutely fine.

To make the sauce blend (in a food processor or similar) the yoghurt, an egg yolk, ground cumin and cornflour. Then place in a frying pan (you’ll need a deep one) and – this is my least favourite cooking instruction – ‘stir continuously’ for 15 minutes, until the sauce has thickened. It didn’t actually take fifteen minutes for it to thicken, although I was making only half the amount. While you are doing this, cook the pasta to a little under al dente (because although this recipe is weird and mainly Middle Eastern, it does still have some Italian standards).

Weird sauce hits the pan

Add the semi-cooked pasta and roasted squash to the yoghurt sauce, give it a good stir and cook for a few minutes, until the pasta is done. Serve with the crispy garlic and garlicky oil poured over the top. There is also supposed to be a tomato an chilli sauce on top, but as I didn’t have tomatoes I just sprinkled some fresh chopped chilli over the top.

Pasta and squash cooking in the sauce - note crispy garlic in the background.

So, how did this concoction taste? It was actually really nice. Weird, but nice. It took a few mouthfuls to get used to the taste, but after this we both really liked it. You could substitute any veg you fancied for the squash – we thought mushrooms might work.  The crispy garlic, by the way, was absolutely wonderful, and I will be adding it to anything I can think of in future.

The final result