Butternut Tornado

I’ve just been bought a camera for skyping sessions. It's quite disconcerting. I’m not sure about it. I feel obliged to put my lipstick on before calling anyone and it’s strange bringing vanity into telephone conversations. But it’s free and I have to admit that it can be good fun. Zelda and I dressed up as fantastic witches on Halloween and skyped all our friends to scare them.

I’ve just made up a really good recipe using butternut squash. I stole some of the ingredients from a Jamie Oliver recipe, but I kept on adding to it until it was really delicious. I’ve decided to give up red meat, particularly cow meat, to save the planet so I’m trying out lots of new vegetarian recipes.

Here is my Spicy Butternut Pasta Bake

1 butternut squash
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons dried oregano
½ teaspoon fennel seeds
2 small dried chillies
1 teaspoon Maldon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 cloves garlic
2 cloves smoked garlic (if you can find it) otherwise add 2 cloves of normal garlic
Olive oil
2 red onions
Fresh pasta
Double cream
Parmesan cheese

All you do is cut the butternut squash in half and scoop out the gunge and seeds. Lay them in a baking tray.

Put all the spices into a pestle and mortar and give them a good pounding until the seeds turn into fine powder. Add the 2 unsmoked garlic cloves and pound again.

Then add enough olive oil to make a nice pesto consistency paste. Smear this all over the butternut squash, cut the onions in half unpeeled and tuck between the squash and drizzle some more olive oil on top of everything. Put two cloves of smoked or unsmoked garlic in whole and unpeeled too.

Cook in a preheated oven (200 degrees centigrade) for about 40 minutes.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta for however long it takes. I used Waitrose’s Trompetti pasta which is really lovely for this. Drain the pasta and put it in a large ovenproof bowl. Cut the squash up in chunks scraping it off the skin first. Squish the garlic cloves in the mixture. Add all this and the onions (peel them from their skins) and mix up gently with the pasta. Grate in some parmesan and pour in just enough double cream to make the mixture moist. Mix one last time and then grate some more parmesan on top.

Put back in the oven and leave until the cheese is bubbling and melted.

While this was cooking we had an extraordinary mini tornado outside. It has wreaked havoc in the space of just a few minutes. Nearly all my pots in the courtyard have fallen over, some have broken alas, and every one of my bay trees which are at least 7 feet tall and in huge great troughs has been knocked over. It was just like the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. I'm going out now to clear up the devastation. I've put on my red shoes.