26.12.08: Quorn, black bnz, red cabbage, and baked butternut squash

Can you believe we cooked at all the day after Christmas? We're saving the considerable turkey leftovers for something special, you'll see. So on with the dinner show: She heated up some leftover balck bnz and another container o' red cabbage, panfried some lemon-pepper quorn escalopes, and baked a butternut squash with a touch of maple syrup.

Squash seeds toasted with sage, celery salt, black pepper and oregano made a fine snacky accompaniment, while a dutiful salad of radish and leaves held upt he raw food portion of the programme.

SHE SAYS: Wow. That was some seriously bland butternut, even though it got a typical treatment of olive oil, maple syrup and salt 'n' pepper. Puzzling. Bnz had a good second outing, at least, and the red cabbage did its usual sugar 'n' spice number with a touch of the tart about it. Can't help but love crunchy chickeny quorn, and the seasoned squash seeds almost made up for their ho-hum counterpart.

HE SAYS: Yes, a shame about the squash, I think skinning and cubing it before roasting it delivers better results. Other then that, all was good: the bnz retained their herbiness, the red cabbage flexed its sweet, vinegary muscle and the quorn added the crunch to the plate. The salad was a plain palate-cleansing affair but it was the squash seeds that were too fantastic to describe in a few words, so I won't even attempt it.