Recipe: Creamy roasted butternut squash and sage tagliatelle

I love to cook this when the nights start drawing in; it's so quick and easy and delicious. It makes your house smell like autumn and tastes a lot more opulent than it is!

It's also really easy to make dairy free and/or gluten free, see bottom.

Serves: 2
Takes: 5 minutes prep time, roughly 40 minutes cooking time.

Ingredients:
250g frozen butternut squash pieces* (note: see step 1)
1 onion, diced
1 heaped teaspoon garlic purée
1 1/2 tablespoons of good quality olive oil
1 teaspoon of dried sage
2 - 3 dried bay leaves
pinch each of salt and pepper
4 tablespoons of single cream

To serve:
Hard cheese/parmesan, grated, optional and amount to taste 
Cooked tagliatelle (spaghetti also works nicely)

Preheat oven to gas mark 5.

1. I like to chop the butternut squash into small cubes before I roast it, so I defrost it before hand for a couple of hours. Put your cubes into a small roasting dish with the onion, garlic purée, olive oil, sage, bay leaves and seasoning and stir together. 
2. Put dish into the oven, stir occasionally. After about 30 minutes it'll start to colour and the squash will begin to break down, at this point add the cream and stir together. Put back in the oven. This is also when I like to start cooking the pasta, given a cooking time of 10 minutes.

This is the point where I add cream, almost done!

3. After 10 more minutes the squash should be nearly completely broken down into a paste. Serve over tagliatelle with optional cheese on top. Don't eat the bay leaves and enjoy!

Note: I have done this recipe with both lactofree cream and soya cream, it works fine. Omit cheese or use finely grated lactofree cheese. For a gluten free option simply use gluten free tagliatelle, I buy mine from Tesco.

Musings at 1AM

When you have a chronic illness getting through the day sometimes feels like just clinging on 'till your next napping opportunity. Like you're existing but not living. When it's invisible it's like coming out of the closet when you socialise, not wanting to meet new people in case they ask what you "do" (eat, sleep, watch TV and stroke cats, mostly), or, even worse, make snide jokes about how you still live at home with your parents. You don't want to talk to your old friends because it's hard to see them do things and hard to admit you've done nothing. It's people gossiping behind your back that you're faking because they saw you doing something that one time and that you should just get a job, like you want to live this life. It's days after you push yourself to do something big where you count brushing your teeth, eating something and sitting on a sofa an achievement, when every sound is too loud, every light is too bright, everything is just too difficult and you turn into a crotchety grouch that cries because she can't open a tin of tomatoes. It's that stiff upper lip thing of saying "I'm fine" if anyone asks. It's feeling like a burden to everyone you're close to; your partner because you can't contribute financially, your mum because you never moved out like her friends' children, your friends because you don't have any interesting anecdotes and "been up to much?" Only yields the answer "not really" and you worry they'll get wise and dump you because you're no use to anyone. It's sitting around watching while your friends go to university, party, get jobs, marry, have children, travel the world, and you've not moved on from where you were 12 years ago when this started, no prospects, no future, no life. It's isolation leading to depression and anxiety so that you're scared of every little noise and walk round your own home on tenterhooks for years of your late teenage years. The best years of your life. You're never getting those back. It's the realisation that things are probably never going to significantly change for you and that you face a life of hardship and poverty, scraping by while people constantly try to push you into jobs you can't do. It's pain and the feeling of lead in your limbs and moths in your brain. It's life and you just have to keep on.