Spelling it out

I have started a campaign recently to make my salads more interesting and the campaign began on Remembrance Sunday when I made a Spelt Salad with squash, walnuts and fennel. The soundtrack to the salad preparation was Pink Floyd's 1975 effort Wish You Were Here which I received for a Christmas present in 1999, the album is for me one of three greatest of all time and is packed with late keyboardist Rick Wright's best keyboard work, plenty of haunting guitar lines and inciteful lyrics.

I peeled a large butternut squash and then cut it in half before using the knife to cut out the inner lining containing the seeds and the chewy orange pith. Once the seeds and pith were disposed of I cut the squash into small cubes and put then in a glass baking dish that I had greased with margarine. I then poured two tablespoons of olive oil onto the squash with a hint of black pepper and stirred the oil and pepper into the squash so that it was completely coated in the oil and pepper.

I then put the dish with the squash, oil and black pepper into the oven, which I had pre-heated to 180 degrees (190 degrees for non-fan ovens) and cooked it for fifteen minutes.While the squash was cooking I took three fennel bulbs and after tailing them and removing their outer layers I cut them into around eight pieces. After the squash had cooked for fifteen minutes I added the fennel and two finely chopped cloves of garlic to the dish and stirred them in vigorously before leaving them to cook in the oven at the same temperature as before for a further twenty minutes.

After the twenty minutes had expired I scattered fifty grams worth of chopped walnuts over the dish and then cooked it for another ten minutes in the oven at the same temperature. After the food had cooked sufficiently the vegetables had become slightly tender and the walnuts were partially toasted. I then took the opportunity to squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the dish and then added two sprigs of parsley to it together with about two ounces of grated Parmesan Cheese.

I served it with a few leaves of iceberg lettuce and found that I had made a salad that was made rich through the walnuts and Parmesan while the squash provided sufficient body make the meal substantial and the fennel acted to give it a pleasant aniseed taste.

The dish is perfect with a spot of iceberg lettuce