Pumpkin Enchilladas with a Mole Sauce

When flicking through our folder of recipes, looking for the carbonara one, I fell across a recipe that I had printed out in 2004 and had never cooked, Pumpkin Enchilladas with Mole Sauce.  As we were pre-armed with chilli chocolate jam, now seamed like the perfect time to try it out.

An additional reason for choosing this particular meal for tonight's menu was our visitor for the evening.  Kato is a rising star of the Leeds Music scene and a vegetarian.  I have nothing against either of these traits, in fact I'm quite envious of at least one of them.  We don't eat meat for every meal but I wouldn't choose a life without bacon.  I would love to be more musical than I am.  I own two guitars and a ukulele but can only just manage to knock out a tune on them if Jupiter is in alignment with Uranus.

I am however, more than capable of following a recipe and altering it as I go along.  The stuffing for the enchilladas was so simple to make.  I mixed a tin of refried beans with three small roasted butternut squash and added some chilli and fresh coriander.  The mixture was then stuffed into tortillas and baked.  The mole sauce had a base of fried onion and a tin of tomatoes into which I added half jar of The Chilli Jam Man's chocolate jam.  This is then blended and reheated before pouring it over the enchilladas.  The full original recipe by Simon Rimmer can be found here.

As we had a guest, Z decided to make dessert.  Cooking carbonara earlier in the week had left us with a surfeit of egg whites so Z rolled up her sleeves and cracked on with her first attempt at a pavlova.  With rhubarb season in full flow Z managed my trick of buying far too much from Leeds Market. She roasted it with sugar and stem ginger syrup and served it piled on top of the meringue with yoghurt instead of cream.  It was great but we'll be eating rhubarb for a week.

Pumpkin and Ricotta Lasagne

There is an awful lot being said about eating less meat these days.  Even celebrity chefs are extolling the virtues of eating more vegetables in place of meat, in an attempt to save the planet from our over dependence on cheap beef.  I'm all in favour of this and as such we are eating less meat.  We try, where possible, to eat higher welfare meat so that when we do tuck into a steak it's a really good one.  It's our way of helping out. 

Dutch scientists have taken a different approach.  To aid our apparent obsession with red meat, those crazy men in white coats have managed to grow muscle tissue in a petri dish.  Their apparent end-game is a completely lab created burger.  I'm in two minds about this and the flippant one wonders if the scientists shouldn't be doing something more valid with their research grants than playing Build A Better Burger.

That aside tonight's menu is a vegetarian one.  Roasted pumpkin, fried onions, ricotta and tomato sauce, all seasoned with sage, are layered with sheets of pasta and baked.  There is not a sniff of meat anywhere near this lasagne.  It's far from vegan but I don't love the planet that much.