Cooking the books

As well as accumulating a decent cookbook collection, I also have a tendency to collect free food magazines – well worth a Waitrose trip once a month to get their free magazine, and I also like Feast in the Guardian on a Saturday. One of my tasks over New Year was to go through the pile of magazines and papers, and sort them into ‘keep’ or ‘bin’. So today’s new recipe isn’t from a book, it’s one of the keeps, a Guardian Feast recipe from November for butternut squash nasu dengaku. It’s really very easy – roast the squash, make a miso, mirin and saki sauce, spread the sauce on the squash, grill it, eat it. To go with it I also made some Wagamama style wok fried greens which is one of my favourite side dishes for Southeast Asian style food. I didn’t use the Wagamama recipe, partly because I haven’t got any oyster sauce, but also because the ingredients list includes a knob of ginger which isn’t mentioned in the recipe instructions, so if they got that wrong, what else might be wrong? Instead I followed this recipe from Rhian’s recipes, a really good vegan recipe site; she used pak choi and tenderstem broccoli which is what I had, plus tamari, sesame oil and garlic. Really quick and easy to make – I used my wok-style deep frying pan and put a lid on for a couple of minutes to get the veggies to a ‘just cooked but still got some crunch’ state.

So, very tasty with not a huge amount of effort. The one thing I would advise is don’t add any salt – the Guardian recipe has salt in it, but by the time you’ve got soy, miso and tamari, it’s salty enough, plus with all that flavour you don’t actually need salt.