A squash by any other name would taste as sweet…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while cooking with Jamie, it’s that just coz we’re part of the colonies, doesn’t mean we speak the same language.

Incredible Boiled Butternut Squash with Squash Seed & Parmesan Pangrattato

You know that I’ve struggled to match Jamie’s fish, I’ve had a few issues with seasonal produce and getting my timing right and have moved Wikipedia to my favourites as I look up ingredients that have a different name down under.

Well, we know that a squash is a pumpkin, but why? It’s coz the Poms think that pumpkins are pig food, so if they call it a squash instead, they can eat it without feeling like a pig…

Did I wiki that? Nah, just made it up. But I don’t think I’m too far off.

Well, I love pumpkin and so does Mum, so we made the last vegie recipe in the book the centrepiece of a simple Sunday night dinner. The recipe says to boil a whole pumpkin for an hour, so I thought I’d done really well when I found a mini butternut pumpkin – a whole pumpkin, but just enough for two.

Whole pumpkin, into a saucepan of boiling salted water, lid on, turned down to a simmer and left to it’s own devices for an hour. Meanwhile, I pan fried breadcrumbs, fresh thyme, dried chilli and S&P with oil to make the pangrattato. Once the pumpkin was done (super soft and squashy – pardon the pun…), I drained it and sliced it in half. This was the bit where the mini pumpkin turned out to be not so great. Once in half, I was supposed to scoop out the seeds, wash them and then fry them up with the pangrattato. But… THERE WERE NO SEEDS. Mum tells me that this is because it was a mini (a baby) and therefore hadn’t developed enough to have grown it’s own seeds yet. Poor little fella.

So I had to skip the seeds and just add the parmesan and some chopped parsley to the breadcrumbs to finish off the pangrattato. I chopped the pumpkin (still with it’s skin on) into chunks, drizzled it (from a height, as directed – though I’m not sure exactly why it had to be from a height) with olive oil and balsamic vinegar then sprinkled the pangrattato on top.

We had sausages and peas with it, so it was in the end, a sort of a fancy mash and it was in the end very squashy, but it is still a pumpkin, no matter what they say…

Xx