Sunday 14 October 2012

Roasted Squash with Merguez-Spiced Chickpeas

I am so in love with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's "Veg Every Day" cookbook - a constant source of inspiration for using up the veg from my Riverford box.  We've eaten much more healthily (and cheaply) with the arrival of both these essentials in our lives!  The party last night gave us another opportunity to try out one of the recipes, and this was a delicious, cheap and filling dish to plonk on the table alongside all the other goodies.  I was so busy yesterday, I forgot to take pictures of most of the food, so I will simply link to the channel 4 website which gives both the recipe and a nice picture of the finished dish.  There is no meat in this - the reference to merguez relates to the classic seasoning for the North African sausage, which is put to use in a seasoned oil to dress the veg and pulses - a heady blend of garlic, caraway, fennel seed, cumin, smoked paprika, rosemary and Cayenne pepper.  I used tinned chickpeas rather than cook my own (I never seem to be able to get the chickpeas soft when I prep them from dry, and the 'East End' brand provides lovely soft, yielding peas) and I also cheated massively by using a bag of frozen butternut squash from Waitrose - what a BRILLIANT timesaver!  Anyway, a really nice dish, and one for the under a fiver thread too.

2 comments:

  1. Love the sound of that seasoning. I've just cooked up 500g of dried chickpeas which works out at about 6 cans and is heaps cheaper. I have trouble too sometimes, but these ones worked beautifully. I think the secret is, for me at least, not to keep them hanging around in a jar for several years ;-)

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  2. Glad it worked with tinned chickpeas! Love the sound of this dish!

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