Nigel Slater's Squash and Turkey Bake

Nigel Slater is one of my favourite cookery writers, and Real Food probably my most used cookery book. It automatically opens at the Thai Green Curry recipe! I always miss out one or two ingredients if I don't use the book.

He has chapters on some of my favourite things: potatoes, chicken, garlic, bread and chocolate.... and his website is one of the nicest I've seen...lovely and simple with nice images but most of all yummy food.

The concept of his recent series Simple Suppers is just what you'd expect...only better because it involves not only food but his garden too or friend's allotments where he actually cooks them supper.  What a great friend to have and he seems like such a nice person...


I managed to watch Wednesday's episode of the series at the weekend, (you can catch it on iPlayer) and loved his idea of tweaking a shepherd's pie by using turkey mince and a butternut squash topping....great for me because I don't eat red meat. It was really delicious....It's the first time that I've used turkey mince and the smell of it cooking along with the sage was reminiscent of my granddad's kitchen the night before Christmas.  That's when he would begin to prepare his delicious sage and onion gravy....mmmm....


You can find his recipe here.  I substituted the squash with pumpkin. I roasted it so that it would caramelise instead of steaming, because I don't think it has as much flavour as squash and sage instead of thyme. It worked really well and I'll definitely be making this again...and using turkey mince in other dishes too.