Apple Pie Porridge

I dreamed a dream and made it real.

Last night I dreamt of many thing, but in one tiny part of my dream I was in the café in Groundhog Day and I was eating apple pie porridge.  I woke up with a need to make that real.  We also had a friend staying over on our sofa, so breakfast was a lovely event; my wife and our friend had avocado on toast, our housemate and I had porridge, we all had various different types of tea and we all curled up under duvets and blankets and carried on talking from the night before.  Sometimes terrible things happen, and sometimes it takes duvets and tea and huddling together to try to make sense of the world.  Sometimes you can’t make sense of the world, sometimes you can only complain about it and drink tea (and wine).

Sometimes you need a hot breakfast.

Apple Pie Porridge

(Served two with leftovers.  Serves four?)

Ingredients:

everything looks classy
when you have cinnamon sticks.

• 1 apple, grated
• 1 cup oats
• 2 cups almond milk (other milk would be fine, but almond milk adds to the nutty sweetness that makes this taste more like pie)
• 2 teaspoons brown sugar (not really needed.  But I liked it.)
• Half a cinnamon stick (ground cinnamon would be totally fine)
• Pinch of ground ginger (fresh would be better, didn't have any)
• Loads of nutmeg, maybe 20 grates?
• 2 cloves
• 1 star anise

(Or scrap all of that and use a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice)

• Maple syrup to serve

Method:

• Toast the oats in a saucepan until they just start to change colour.  This will add a nutty flavour to the porridge that is reminiscent of pastry.
• Add the milk and the apple, stir well.
• Add the sugar and the spices and cook for 5-10-15 minutes.  I cooked it for longer than I would have normally cooked porridge because I wanted the apple to melt down.
• Slop into a couple of bowls and pour some syrup over the top.
• Eat, pull the blanket up around your chin and feel comforted.

Roast Butternut Squash

with Red Lentils, Tomatoes and Tamarind

A dark sultry stew to eat in your pyjamas on a quiet January night

(Or to serve with dumplings and fancy veg

if you feel the need to impress anyone)

I have a confession to make; I got caught up in the snow drama and I did some panic buying.  Not real panic buying, not five loaves of bread and all the milk in Sainsburys panic buying, but panic buying nonetheless.  I walked into the vegetable aisle to try and buy some broccoli but the whole aisle was empty.  Literally empty, no potatoes, no root vegetables, no brassics – just a whole row of plastic crates turned upside down.

(image from yahoo)

Now on a normal day this would be fine, there are other shops in existence.  But this wasn't a normal day.  This was a snow day.  I was cold and a little bit damp.  My car is a little bit dodgy.  I had my housemate and a neighbour with me, also wanting to buy a few bits and bobs.  And somehow in my head (with thanks to mass-media-snowmegeddon-hype) this became I HAVE TO BUY ENOUGH NOW TO LAST US FOR A MONTH IN CASE WE ALL GET SNOWED IN.  These people are my responsibility, I will feed the masses as we huddle together hiding from the weather.  We must be quick, quick I tell you, we must trade for goods quickly (pay) and cross the fields (A52) back to our homestead (terraced house) before the storm (mild snow) hits the village (city).  And so I freaked out a little, gave in to the panic and bought the only vegetable left in the shop, a massive, massive, massive butternut squash.

Whilst I like butternut squash, my wife isn't so keen.  So we got the squash home, spent two weeks in mild snow, didn't miss a day of work, didn't have a single day when we couldn't drive, didn't have a single day when we couldn't walk to a shop and our life went on as normal.  We ate lots of food, we drunk a fair bit of wine and the squash (who had very quickly become a vegetepal) sat in the kitchen looking unwanted.

like this, but with a squash four times as big and covered in sharpie.

A couple of days ago when I was stressed and cranky (it happens) I peeled the face of my vegetepal and roasted it for ages with some thyme and garlic, not knowing what the next step would be.  Sunday rolled around, I wanted wholesome food, squash came out of the fridge and this was borne of my cravings: 

Roast butternut squash with red lentils, tomatoes and tamarind

(serves at least four for dinner and two for lunchboxes the next day,

and probably more if wanted)

Ingredients:

I love my plates

• 1 massive butternut squash, peeled, roasted in sunflower oil for about an hour in a hot oven (gas mark 8, 230c, 450f), with 8 peeled cloves of garlic, a handful of fresh thyme.  Roast it until the pieces have darkened and the edges or corners have turned black and all of the pieces are soft.  (by the way, I kept the oil form this and used it later to cook the rest of the meal.  No way am I getting rid of garlic and thyme infused oil!  Just pour it into an empty jam jar and it’ll keep fine for a while)

• Oil (I use sunflower but only because I like the pictures of the flowers on the bottle.  Use whatever you like)
• 4 onions, chopped into fairly chunky pieces
• 4 cloves garlic, slice finely (but pureed, grated or chopped would be fine)
• 4 cans chopped tomatoes
• 1 cup red lentils (rinsed, and picked over to remove any stones, twigs etc.  or, you know, buy them from a supermarket instead of a hippy shop (buy them from a hippy shop.  It’s cheaper and better and it only takes two minutes to pick them over before cooking))
• 1 teaspoon Marmite (makes the savoury more savoury)
• 1 mushroom stockcube (because I had them, vegetable stock would be fine)
• 1 tablespoon liquid aminos (flavour sauce, much like Worcestershire sauce.  Feel free to use 1 tsp of Worcester sauce instead is you don’t mind eating fish (gross), or a teaspoon of soy sauce)
• 1 bay leaf (I used 3, but that’s a lot if you weren't gifted a carrier bag full of them by a friend with a tree in their garden)
• 2 tablespoons tamarind paste (mine is from a jar, but reconstituted from dry, or from a tube would be the same)
• 2 cups apple juice
• Some fresh thyme (if you want)

Method:

• Fry the onions over a medium heat until coloured, add the garlic and cook down until soft and brown
• Add the lentils and the tinned tomatoes.  If your tomatoes are the 17p ones, and if they’re more water than tomato (as mine often are if I buy them at the end of the month), and a tablespoon of tomato puree
• Add the Marmite, stock cube, liquid aminos, bay leaf and tamarind. (Although, honestly, if you don’t have all of these just add anything you like.  Savoury flavour is all good.  Balsamic vinegar would be lovely, cumin would be great, black pepper would be amazing, use whatever you have.)
• Stir, cover and cook on a low heat for about-an-hour (about-an-hour means anything from 20 minutes to 90 minutes.  It’s a flexible time), adding apple juice every 15 minutes or so, and stirring well.  Keep doing this until all the apple juice has been added, all the lentils are cooked, all the tomatoes have turned from light red (acidic) to dark red (sweet) and until the smell fills every corner of your house.  Add more juice if needed, add less juice if it isn't absorbing so much.  It’s stew, it’s flexible. 
• If it starts to stick on the bottom of the pan, take it off the heat, let it sit for a couple of minutes and then stir well.  Anything stuck will lift off and add an amazing dark caramel flavour to the dish.
• Once the lentils are cooked, add in the squash, removing the strings of thyme and the soft squishy cloves of roast garlic.
• Eat the soft squishy cloves of roast garlic, and hand feed them to the people you love and take a minute to marvel at this sexy exciting food.  Anyway.  Back to the stew.
• Cook for 5-10 minutes more until the squash is piping hot but try to avoid stirring it too much, try to not break up the pieces.
• Use this time to cook rice/couscous/quinoa/whatever you want to serve with the stew (or have potatoes baking for the whole time.  That would be amazing.).
• Stir in the fresh thyme and slop onto the plate.
• Warm, wholesome, full of vegetable and protein and lifted into tangy glory by the tamarind.  This may be slop, but it’s beautiful.