Great food for a great price makes sense no matter what you can afford. If you shop smart
and find cheaper cuts to buy, cook clever and waste less, you'll be quids in, I promise you.
I've just saved myself a little bit of money just by roasting a whole butternut squash in the
oven while it was on anyway. And now I'm gonna turn that squash into a beautiful Italian dish
that'll have you shouting "mamma mia"! It's my squash and spinach rotolo.
Okay the next recipe is absolutely gorgeous, it's a cross between like a lasagna and a cannelloni,
it's called rotolo! Rolled up. It's gorgeous,
beautiful roasted squash I'll show you that in a minute, with amazing spinach, gorgeous cheese,
tomato sauce, blipping away golden and crispy you are gonna love it and it's real fun to make.
First, prepare your squash. Scoop out the seeds and peel off the skin,
but don't chuck 'em away. You can eat them. Georgie can we just bake that in the oven, because
I think that that tossed through a lovely sort of a mixed salad would be fantastic. Yeah, gorgeous!
Then mash up the squash, season and boom, job done. That's it just beautiful natural
gorgeous squash in all of its simple glory, it's gonna be really really tasty.
It's heavenly, absolutely heavenly. The best baby food in the world, minus the salt.
Fantastic as a base for a soup, just a few onions and some basic herbs,
you know liquidize it with some stock, fantastic. I love those kind of principal
recipes, like all of you have got to try doing that, skin off, seeds out,
mash it up - unbelievable. Use it like a mashed potato, phenomenal. Okay, enough of that talking.
For the next layer of your pasta filling, the spinach bit, start by chopping one red onion.
I've got some olive oil in the pan, I'm gonna go in with some onions here. And we'll fry this off.
So we start getting some flavor in there, a nice pinch of salt and pepper goes in. Right
give that a nice little toss. Let that start to fry. We're gonna make a really dark delicious
dense spinach, really really nice okay? And for that there is absolutely no point and no
advantage of using fresh spinach, okay. So bear with me. Now, when you're gonna cook down spinach
into soups, stews, do nice little gratins with cream and parmesan, in this case we're cooking
it down with herbs and onion to go inside this beautiful pasta dish. When you do that,
you really kind of cook it hard. So there's no benefit in using fresh spinach which by the way
is quite pricey and massive in volume, it really takes up a lot of space. So come over here. I love
fresh spinach, I grow it I buy it, but I also love the frozen stuff. And genuinely genuinely
it's really useful and it's just gonna give you that nice dark deep kind of flavour, amazing
with kind of curries sort of a bombay spinach, beautiful. So I'm gonna toss up these onions,
as soon as they get soft I'm gonna throw these in. In actual fact I'm gonna throw these in right now.
The bonus here is to have that much spinach in a pan I'd have to buy like four bags, right? It's
gonna be really expensive. Top your spinach off with some nutmeg and leave to cook down slowly
for 15 minutes. Look at the colours the squash and the spinach, beautiful, really really beautiful.
Next a super quick and super delicious tomato sauce. Slice up four cloves of garlic and a
chilli if you like a bit of a kick. Just chop it up. So this can go in a pan with a little olive
oil. And then over here we're using some passata, 700 mils of passata. It's already kind of been
sort of moule'd and pureed so look, as soon as that garlic gets a little bit golden pour it in.
Look at it just sizzling away. Gonna get a bit of water to clean out the jar. Also these jars
are worth keeping, they're great for sort of sauces and preserves,
vinegars, stuff like that, if you do any of that sort of stuff. Just mix that in.
Really, really nice. Simple, very very simple tomato sauce.
Mix it in. We'll bring that to the boil, remember of course the tomatoes are already
cooked you're just reheating them. So, my friends, it's time to make the rotolo.
I'm using fresh pasta lasagna sheets. If they're a bit stiff you can just stick 'em in a bit of
boiling water for a few seconds. I'm just doing it for 20 seconds just to stop it from cracking,
you know 'cos I'm gonna roll it up I don't want it busting over the place. You might
not have to do it, you make the call. Lay them flat and grab your smashed squash.
Now the fun bit. We're gonna divide the squash between the six pieces of pasta here. So think of
each one of these little filled pastas, it's gotta be good, it's a little present you know what I
mean? The fact that this is beautifully seasoned is up to you, it's totally your responsibility to
taste it, season it, and love it. There's nothing chef-y about this at all this is kids play. This
is like mud pies when you were a kid, you know just spread it out. Now, the spinach layer. Look
how dark that is you can hardly see the difference between the spinach and the pan. Just kind of...
just shake off around, divide it roughly. So I'm just gonna mix up this spinach, look at that.
To give my dish a lovely cheap punch of extra flavor, I'm gonna crumble over a fine layer of
feta cheese. If you wanna be more classically Italian, you could just use ricotta instead.
I want about 50 grams of feta. Again look at the colors. Just sprinkle that across
the top. Look at that, oh dear oh dear. Top it all off with a layer of parmesan.
So look at what we got guys, we got these beautiful six bits of pasta, we got this tomato
sauce here, can you just see it blipping away? Ah, that needs a little bit of salt, but basically
very very nice. Let me show you the next bit the most exciting bit.
Very simple, I'm just gonna roll it up. Just think of this like a savoury swiss roll.
Cut it in half and then cut each half in half again, into quarters. Look at that
I mean that's what we're talking about, that's kind of what the story is about.
Just those intense beautiful flavours, white, green, purple... purple?
Just go with it, purple. So that's what we've got we're gonna plop that
into that tomato sauce, and just buddy them up next to each other.
Ben? ((Yep)) Safety first ((Always)). Um, I've used frozen spinach here ((Yep)). If
I cook this and had leftovers, could I freeze it again? ((Yeah you could do,
probably better to freeze it at this stage now. We've done all the filling, let it cool down a
little bit, tub it up put it in the freezer, and then it's a really quick meal one night)).
Right okay. Tuck your pasta rolls into your dish until they're all squeezed in, snuggled up tight.
Finish with a little more grated parmesan and some fresh sage. Put a little oil on the sage,
toss it in the oil. Very important, this way you're gonna take this woody old herb
that only gets used for stuffing, we're gonna put this on the top
of our pasta here and it just transforms the perfume, the flavour, and it kind of cooks
like little crisps. Absolutely phenomenal and is unbelievable, please please have a go at this.
So look that's all there is to it now we've had a little bit of fun, it's a cute dish to do.
You know a lasagna is always a pain in the backside, it's always a bit of an assembly.
I have to say, I think this is easier. You know you haven't got the meat ragu to do, you haven't
got the white sauce to do, but you're getting the same kind of enjoyment and eating quality.
Whack that hot Italian mama into the oven at 180 degrees Celsius and bake for 40 minutes.
When the rotolo is ready it's golden and crispy, and just makes you long to stick a fork in it.
I've done pastas like this before and I call it honeycomb pasta because it kind of just looks like
a honeycomb all cooked into each other, the tomato sauce between all the little gaps, really really
gorgeous. And don't forget you've also got those roasted seeds and skin from the squash, which will
be amazing in a green salad. Don't think I'm going OTT on the old saving money thing, it's delicious.
This rotolo is incredibly tasty, but also super cheap to make. Mm! Comfort food,
something a little different, really good fun to make, come on! What you waiting for? Go cook it!