Recipes of the Month

Pumpkin, Butternut & Squash book: This is another snazzy and useful text from the busy firm of Ryland, Peters and Small, who specialise in single-subject cookbooks, and present their recipes in a stylish and user-friendly way . Lots of good ideas from all over the globe will fire your enthusiasm during the pumpkin season.

Hazel Bourke's Gratin of Spaghetti Squash with Gabriel Cheese

Festooned with stamps depicting birds and bears, we bring home the weighty jiffy bag from the post office and tear it open. Inside is a shoe box, and inside the shoe box is... a spaghetti squash, sent from Assolas House in Kanturk, North Cork, by Hazel Bourke. "I hope you don't have spaghetti squashes coming out of your ears in West Cork", she writes. "We are becoming experts on squash up here!".
The lovely Assolas walled gardens have produced a bumper crop, and Hazel's favourite way of dealing with this aristocrat of the squash family is to adapt a recipe by Annie Bell for Gratin of Squash: "This recipe must be tried!"

Gratin of Spaghetti Squash with Desmond Cheese
Serves 4

1 spaghetti squash (approx 1kg)
150ml double cream
175g Desmond cheese (or gruyere), grated
1 and a half tablespoons kirsch sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and nutmeg.

Prick the squash all over and roast it in a hot oven for approximately 20 minutes. Then allow it to cool before halving it, lengthways. Remove the seeds and spongy fibres. Run a fork along the length of the flesh and it will come away in strands. Leave the mushy flesh immediately next to the skin. The strands should be on the firm side - they will soften when baked.
Place the squash in a sieve and press out most of the additional juices.
Mix the cream, half the cheese, the kirsch and seasoning in a bowl and mix in the squash. Place in a gratin dish and scatter over the remaining cheese
You can prepare to this point in advance. Heat the oven to 200C fan oven 220C/425F/Gas 7 and bake the gratin for 25-30 minutes, until golden in patches.

Website: www.assolas.com
email: assolas@eircom.net

The Great Squash Glut cont...

Gardens throughout the country are now filled with handsome, weighty, sweet squashes and pumpkins. They are perfect for soups, are ace in risottos, but also sublime to eat simply roasted with any member of the allium family. Here is what we did with one of the winter squashes from our garden.

Roasted Winter Squash with Shallots and Thyme
Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Slice a squash in half, then remove the seeds.
Slice it in half again, then in half across the centre. Peel off the skin and slice it into slices about an inch thick, in half moon shapes. Place it in a roasting tin (a Le Creuset is good). Now, peel half a dozen shallots but leave them whole. Toss them on top of the squash slices, and throw a couple of branches of thyme on top (lemon thyme is very good). Pour some quality olive oil on the slices, place in the oven and bake for about 40 minutes, until the slices are soft on the inside and crisped on the outside, the shallots are nicely blackened, and the flavours have all come together.
This is very good with some fish.

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text © John & Sally McKenna
illustrations © Ken Buggy