Thursday 10 October 2013

SQUASH & BACON SQUEAK WITH POACHED EGGS

For my birthday my best friend Amanda bought me a subscription to Olive Magazine which is basically the equivalent of a porn mag for me - restaurant reviews, pictures of food and recipes galore. One of the best things about the recipes is that they give them a difficulty rating and also let you know at the beginning how long it takes.

Wednesdays are always a "rush" day for me - I like to do both body attack and body pump at the gym which takes up all morning and consequently after that I feel I am about to die from exhaustion. Arabella has gym after school and then ballet and we are always running late and then as soon as I arrive home I have to cook something for supper and quickly!

Tonight I decided to try this Squash and Bacon Squeak with Poached Eggs from Olive - it started badly as I don't have a poacher and I don't know how to poach an egg without one (I have only recently started cooking in the past couple of years)! Duh - anyway I figured a soft boiled egg is pretty much the same thing. Olive states this recipe as Easy - it wasn't that easy for Pascal & I but it was worth it in the end.

Ingredients for 2 people:

250g butternut squash, peeled and cut into chunks (I was lazy and bought this preprepared)
1 large potato about 250g, peeled and cut into chunks (Pascal was lazy this time and didn't bother to peel)!
25g butter
1 bunch of spring onions, chopped including the green bits
200g lardons
2 poached / soft boiled eggs
chilli sauce to serve (obviously optional - we opted out and certainly didn't miss it)

(We did it for 3 so slightly increased the ingredients).


First things first steam the squash and potato until tender. I don't have a steamer (there is not much storage space in my kitchen) and so boiled them. It took about 25 minutes in total for the potato and about 15 minutes for the squash (Pascal kindly did this while we were at ballet). 

Once it is soft, tip it into a bowl and mash it together.

Heat the butter in a small frying pan and cook the spring onions and lardons until golden and then mix in the bowl with the squash and potato. I made the error of using too big a frying pan - smaller is definitely better for the next stage


Add some more butter to the frying pan and add the mix of squash, potato, lardons etc, patting it down into a cake and frying until golden on the bottom. This is where Pascal and I went wrong - we couldn't work out when it was cooked on the bottom without messing the cake shape as our frying pan was far too big! Plus it took a lot longer than we thought. At this point I put the eggs on to boil for 5 minutes which was far to early.


Pascal took control. After cooking the squeak / cake for about 8 minutes (when it had started to go golden on the bottom), he then slipped it on to a plate and flipped it over so he could fry the other side. This took a similar amount of time and voila it was ready and served with the egg (not so soft boiled anymore) on top!


I have to admit, as I am not a huge fan of potatoes, I did not expect to like this as much as I did but it really really was good. A hassle to make but I think it would be much easier second time round and I would definitely buy a poacher - anyone know where I can buy a pink one?!

Pascal had got his knickers in a twist when cooking this (he had advised me to use a smaller frying pan and I ignored him which didn't go down well) and he had said he would never cook this again however after eating it he agreed it was delicious as did Arabella - another successful recipe I would recommend!

According to fitness pal, this recipe is about 500 calories.

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