Butternut Squash Lasagne

Made this one up after having something similar (but not that similar) in a café. Takes a long time but tastes great. Don't skimp on the pine nuts.

Ingredients

• cooking oil
• ~1kg butternut squash, processed into about 750g of 2cm cubes
• 200g carrots, cut into lumps
• 200g spinach
• 1/2 a red onion, chopped into wedges
• 3–5 garlic cloves, peeled
• 200g feta cheese
• handful of sage leaves
• Seasoning: still refining this, but used paprika, parsley, thyme last time
• 60g butter
• 60g flour
• 125ml milk
• squeeze of lemon juice
• 1 tbsp pine nuts

Cookware: use the smaller pyrex dish

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180C. Spread all the butternut squash in a roasting tray along with most of the sage, retaining some as garnish. Season and drizzle with olive oil. Shake it around until the squash is coated. Roast in the oven.
   ↓ 10 minutes
2. Add all the carrot to the tray, shake it around to cover it, and resume roasting.
   ↓ 15 minutes
3. Add all the garlic and all the red onion. Shake. Roast.
   ↓ 25 minutes, but use this time to prepare the spinach and cook the white sauce, as follows:
4. Boil the kettle. Put a handful of spinach into the collander and pour some of the boiling water over it to wilt it. Add another handful of spinach and pour more water. Repeat until all the spinach has wilted. Leave it in the collander to cool.
   
   Now melt all the butter into a saucepan on medium heat and mix in all the flour. Stir together so no dry flour remains. By adding a splash, stirring it in, adding another splash, stirring it in and so on, add all of the milk to the sauce and stir until smooth. Crumble in a quarter of the feta cheese and stir until it melts. Season to taste with nutmeg, salt, pepper and the squeeze of lemon juice.
   
   The spinach should now be cool. Squeeze out the excess water and roughly chop the spinach.
   ↓ Once the 25 minutes are up
5. Put 75% of the roasted vegetables into a mixing bowl and roughly crush. Mix in the remaining 25% of the vegetables and all but a sprinkling of the feta. Mix thoroughly. Cover the bottom of the pyrex dish with a layer of this mix and cover it with a thinner layer of spinach. From here, layer ingredients in this order: lasagne sheets, white sauce, vegetable mix, spinach. Make sure to end with white sauce, then top with the pine nuts and last of the feta. Grate some cheddar cheese over the top and put the lasagne in the oven to bake.
   ↓ 30 minutes
6. Coat the remaining sage leaves with oil and scatter them over the lasagne. Return it to the oven to bake.
   ↓ 10 minutes
7. Extract the lasagne and serve.

Gallery

Dates cooked

Meals with shared short-life ingredients

These are recipes that neatly use up leftover ingredients that would otherwise go off. I tend to cook these together in the same week after a grocery order.

Leftover	Meal

For longer-life ingredients, check out this list of recipes grouped by unusual ingredient.