Butternut squash, spinach and blue cheese tart

This was inspired by the vast quantities of butternut squash in the veg box last week.

Makes enough for 4. You'll need:

a medium butternut squash, peeled and cubed
a good slug of olive oil
lots of spinach (about 1/3 of a bag, or whatever frozen stuff you can drag out)
a good hunk of blue cheese (ours was miscellaneous Sainsbury's value 'blue cheese', but stilton would be good, and roquefort or gorganzola pretty special)
one onion, finely sliced
a clove of garlic, minced
shortcrust pastry (enough for an A4-sized baking tray - 8oz flour should do the trick)

Stick the oven on at about 200 degrees C. Tip your cubed squash into an ovenproof dish, and slosh some olive oil over the top. Shake the cubes about until they're coated, then roast in the oven for 20 minutes or so, until the squash is soft.

In the meantime, fry the onion and garlic in a little olive oil until its turned translucent. Add the spinach, and heat in the pan for a couple of minutes until its wilted.

Grease your baking tray, and roll out the shortcrust pastry. Line the tray with the pastry, and then tip the onion/spinach mixture on top. Scatter over your roasted squash, and some cubes of blue cheese. It should now look a little like this:


Season with some salt and black pepper. Turn the oven down to about 180 degrees C, and bake the tart for about 20-25 minutes. It's ready when the pasty is crisp and golden brown, and the cheese has melted.

We ate ours with lashings of black pepper and a nice green salad:

Bacon and blue cheese salad

This is your Dad's kind of salad - one with 'interesting things in'. We ate it today for tea, as the pair of you were still fairly full from IKEA's meatballs and chips at lunchtime...

You'll need:

salad leaves (we had a combination of romaine lettuce, homegrown parsley and celery leaves today)
a couple of cold leftover potatoes, sliced
spring onions, sliced
a large carrot, peeled and sliced thinly
2 or 3 rashers of bacon, chopped into small pieces
a handful of cubes of stilton (or any blue cheese - Roquefort is brilliant, but a little wasted here)
lots of black pepper

Fry the bacon in a small frying pan, until it's crispy. You could even make some croutons by frying cubes of stale bread in the bacon fat, if you're really being fancy.

Chuck the leaves/spring onions/carrot slices in a large bowl. Scatter the bacon pieces and stilton cubes over the top, and toss. Add lots of black pepper, and serve with some crusty bread.

It works very well with a French-ish salad dressing of mustard/olive oil/vinegar/lemon drizzled over the top.