Recipe 1 - Tagliatelle with squash and pine nuts

The first recipe test! After work I decided not to wait for the weekend to start off the testing. However, while going through one of my trusted pasta cookbooks and the local SPAR market for ingredient shopping, I soon discovered that I was missing the most important of all cookbooks - the "Things you can cook with the food that you find at your local SPAR after 7:00 PM that still looks good enough to be eaten" cookbook. I finally managed to find the last squash without moldy bits, but can already see that some of the more "exotic" recipes will require longer shopping trips.

The book

The recipe I'm testing is from "Das große Pasta Kochbuch" (Publisher: Könemann, ISBN 3-8290-0433-8). Yes, German - and no, it's not just Spätzle with Sauerkraut. Recipes from all over the place and I'm giving you the English translation.

This was probably one of my first cookbooks. I bought it, because it seemed to offer good value for money and I've actually used it many times; some of my standard pasta dishes come from this book. Not being a big fan of squash I had avoided the squash recipe so far, but as the stuff is still available, I wanted to give it a try.

The ingredients

30g butter

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

380ml vegetable broth (oddly specific, isn't it?)

750g squash, peeled and cut into small cubes

nutmeg

pepper

250ml whipping cream

80g pine nuts, roasted

500g fresh tagliatelle

2 tablespoons chopped chives

freshly grated parmesan

The recipe

Melt the butter in a big pan, then steam the chopped onion for about 3 minutes, until it softens; then add the garlic and steam for another minute. In the meantime, prepare the vegetable broth, then add it to the pan with the squash cubes. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and let the whole thing simmer until the squash has softened.

Season to taste with pepper and nutmeg on low heat and add the cream. Heat the squash-cream mixture a bit, but don't let it boil. Puree it in the blender until smooth.

In the meantime, cook the pasta in a big pot of boiling saltwater until it's al dente. Drain the pasta when it's done and put it back into the pot.

Add the sauce and pine nuts and garnish with the chives. Serve with parmesan on the side.

The testing

I had to make small changes to the recipe, but the essentials stayed the same. Had only one clove of garlic left (will have to put that onto my next shopping list) and I used a big pot for steaming the squash, not a pan. I also used a red onion, because they looked better (as I said - SPAR after 7:00 PM...). The non-moldy squash resulted in slightly less than 750g of cubes, so I reduced the amount of broth a bit. Maybe the broth wasn't "brothy" enough, as I had to season with a bit of extra salt to make it taste nicer. I also didn't use fresh tagliatelle, but dried tagliatelle that I had made myself from scratch two days earlier - some colored with beetroot, some with a bit of pepper in the pasta dough - and it was definitely not 500g of pasta, only enough for 2, so we have some left over sauce.

The result

Here's what it looked like. Wanted to upload a photo from the cookbook for comparison, but blogger gave me an error message. Surprisingly, it didn't look much different. Using their somewhat silly serving suggestion of adding bay leaves just for show might have helped my dish to earn points in the look-alike department.

The verdict

My husband Roland took his first bite and exclaimed: "So squash can actually taste nice!" - I tend to agree. Still not my favorite veggie, but a nice dish for those seasons with less tasty vegetable options. The pine nuts gave it an interesting note - depending on the amount of nuts with each fork the taste changed a bit with each bite; without them it would have been abit boring. Will make this again, but would probably try to give a bit more zing, more tanginess the next time, possibly with a dash of lemon juice or some goats cheese mixed into it. This would actually also make a nice squash soup.