Warm Winter Salad with Salted Maple Squash & Halloumi. This is a vegetarian comforting winter dish and I promise you won’t miss the meat in this one. The salty but sweet chunks of butternut squash, earthy fried mushrooms and crispy cabbage bring lots of flavour and you won’t even realise it’s plant-based. For this recipe, I have used homemade halloumi. I bought a mozzarella, ricotta and halloumi cheese making kit from the The Big Cheese Making Kit a few years ago at a BBC Good Food Show. I tried the ricotta and mozzarella but never the halloumi. The halloumi came out great. The kits are really fun to do and makes loads of cheese, better than any you can find in store. They make a great present so if you’re stuck for ideas with Christmas coming up, I highly recommend one of their kits. Measurements do not have to be exact at all for this recipe and it’s the perfect recipe to experiment with depending on what you have in your fridge- let me know if you recreate this one, especially if you add anything! I’d love to hear from you on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter or drop me an email at [email protected].
RECIPE
DIFFICULTY LEVEL ROOKIE
SERVES 1
Ingredients:
- Half a butternut squash, cut into large wedges
- Maple Syrup
- 1/4 cauliflower, sliced very thinly with a mandolin
- 1/4 red cabbage, sliced very thinly with a mandolin
- 1 large handful of kale
- 3 or 4 mushrooms, thinly sliced
- 30g pine nuts
- 100g halloumi, thickly sliced
- Olive oil
- Salt and pepper
For the dressing:
- 50ml maple syrup
- Half a chilli, very finely chopped
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
METHOD
- Heat the oven to 200C. Toss the chunks of butternut squash with a good glug of olive oil and a generous grinding of salt. Roast for around 25 minutes until soft. Drizzle over a couple tablespoons of maple syrup and continue to roast for a further 5 minutes
- Meanwhile, prepare the rest of the salad. Shred the cauliflower and red cabbage with the mandolin.
- Heat a frying pan over a medium heat and toast the pine nuts until golden. Set aside
- Towards the last five minutes of the squash cooking, fry the mushrooms in a little olive oil until softened and cooked through. Push them to the side of the pan and add a little more olive oil to the pan. Fry the halloumi on both sides for a couple of minutes until golden brown.
- Mix the ingredients for the dressing together, seasoning with a little salt.
- Place the red cabbage and the cauliflower in a large bowl and top with the mushrooms, squash, halloumi and pine nuts. Drizzle over the dressing and enjoy!
If you like this Warm Winter Salad with Salted Maple Squash & Halloumi, try out my Butternut Squash and Truffle Soup
