This dish combines the sunshine of butternut squash with the tang of red peppers, topped off with either cheese and breadcrumbs for crunch, or else meltingly soft cheese. The perfect antidote to a grey, miserable day like the one when I am writing this, but a wonderful reflection of the weather on a sunny day.

Butternut squash is perhaps the most glorious of the vegetables that are readily available now but were almost unheard of in the UK a couple of decades ago.  It tastes fantastic, keeps extremely well, and it even grows happily in our climate.

But butternut squash is the devil’s own job to peel.  So how can it make an appearance in a blog of recipes for travelling – recipes for cooks who want good food without too much effort and probably with less than first class facilities?

It can do this because a simple trick transforms the murderous chore of peeling butternut squash.  Put the unpeeled squash in a bowl or a saucepan (cut in two if necessary) and cover it as best you can with boiling water.  Let it stand for a couple of minutes and drain it.  Now even a blunt peeler in an ill-equipped holiday cottage glides through the skin.  It’s not a trick for the bivvy brigade, or campers with very limited facilities, but if you have a kettle, a saucepan and a peeler, you’re in the frame!

You can make this dish in an oven, or finish it off under the grill, but it is especially brilliant made in a Remoska.  The top heat does something special to it.

If you don’t have any of these, it can certainly be made on a hob, but you’ll need to be happy with the topping being soft melted cheese – and why shouldn’t you be?!

The essence of it –

 Sauté or roast onions, red peppers and butternut squash, all chopped to bite size.  Top with cheese and breadcrumbs, or just cheese and brown the top in the oven or under the grill (or sprinkle cheese over the top, put a lid on and wait for the cheese to melt.  That’s all!  You have to eat it to believe how good it is.

Happy quick and easy cooking and – bon appétit!

Anna

And now in more detail –

Ingredients for four people

A large butternut squash, or two smaller ones

Up to one pepper per person, ideally red, or yellow, but green is good too and produces a different dish.   Half a pepper per person is fine for smaller appetites

2 medium onions – red onions if you are feeling fancy, but white are good too.

50 gr / 2 oz cheese per person for topping, more for hearty appetites.  Lots of different cheeses will work – see the detailed recipe

A small handful of breadcrumbs per person, if you can get hold of breadcrumbs.  Use just cheese if you can’t – equally good, just different

Your preferred oil for cooking

Salt and pepper

Click here for Remoska instructions, otherwise here is how to make it with just a single burner, or an oven, or a single burner and grill.

Chop the onions, not too finely, and sauté them gently in the pan while you de-seed and chop the peppers, also not too finely.

Add the chopped peppers to the pan while you peel the butternut squash, stirring the pan from time to time.  Turn the heat down or take it off the heat temporarily if the veg are beginning to colour.

The pieces of butternut squash should be bite-sized.  Add them to the veg mix and continue to sauté, stirring from time to time, until they have softened but still have some bite.

If you are lucky enough to have been able to use a pan that will go under the grill or in the oven, add the cheese topping and grill it until brown, or put the dish with topping in a hot oven until the top is browned.  This might be 10 minutes 200C, or 15 at 180C – whatever suits your plans, and the vagaries of the oven you are working with.  Just keep an eye on it until it looks attractive and ready.

If you have no grill or oven, then put the cheese over the top, add a lid and leave it undisturbed for about five minutes on an extremely low heat (you may need to use a heat diffuser).  If your cooking equipment is not that sophisticated, just take the pan off the hob – it won’t lose much heat with a lid on.  When the five minutes is up, open it, discover nicely melted cheese, and serve.

If you ask “what cheese?”, I will answer “what cheese do you have?”.  If you have the wherewithal and time to make decent breadcrumbs, or can get them in a shop (not those horrid yellow-orange things), then a mix of just plain cheddar and breadcrumbs takes some beating. Grate the cheese and mix it loosely by hand on a plate with roughly an equal volume of breadcrumbs (how many breadcrumbs can be very haphazard – it makes a very good but different dish whatever proportions you use).

If you’re using breadcrumbs, Cheshire or Wensleydale or Lancashire could be good, or similar hard cheeses.  You could give it a go with anything you can grate.

If you don’t have or don’t want breadcrumbs, or if your facilities mean you have to just melt the cheese by leaving the lid on the pan, then the world’s your oyster.  You are spoilt for choice.  What cheeses do you know that melt nicely and whose flavour would work with peppers (which are probably more finicky about what they go with than the serene and charming butternut squash is)?  Gruyere is the ultimate melting cheese, with emmental following close behind, and if cutting the cook’s work is more important than keeping to a tight budget, both have the advantage that they are often available ready-grated in supermarkets. Or what about some very ripe camembert or brie that needs eating up sliced over the top?  Or mozzarella roughly torn?

If this dish could ever seem to be putting in too many appearance and to be in need of a makeover (it hasn’t yet here, despite multiple repeat outings), you could dress it in entirely new clothes by using a blue cheese – stilton left over from Christmas (it freezes well for exactly this sort of purpose), gorgonzola, cambozola – a whole range of blue cheeses.