Roast carrot and garlic soup with cashew nuts, chilli and lime

That's a terribly complicated title for a very simple recipe. It tastes like the BEST THING IN THE WORLD.

What you need for this to serve three to four people

Ingredients:

• some carrots - about 500 g or 1 lb would be good (see note below).  I think organic carrots taste far better, but YMMV.
• Some garlic - say, one clove for each carrot or about eight cloves for 500 g.
• One chilli or chillies of an appropriate strength, fresh or dried.  You can use powdered or flaked chilli if you wish
• One lime
• About 150 - 250 g of cashew nuts, not roasted
• 800 mL of good chicken stock; you can probably substitute vegetable stock if you want this to be vegan.
• Olive Oil
• salt and pepper.

When I was cooking this so that I could take pictures, I found fewer carrots in the fridge than I remembered having, and this number of carrots (shown in the picture) made around two healthy servings.  I think that this is around 250 g of carrots, but for three to four servings, use about twice as many as are shown in this picture:

(My phone lens has steamed up taking pictures of food, so these pictures aren't great, sorry).

 

Method

 

Preheat an oven to around 200 °C.  A fan oven could be slighty lower, and I believe that the gas oven equivalent to 200 °C is around Gas Mark 6. 

 

Peel your carrots and chop them into chunks. 

Pull a garlic bulb into enough separate cloves, and take the flakey, tissue-y skin off the bulbs by rubbing, leaving the tougher peel in place. 

The picture shows how much garlic I used for the four carrots above, de-tissued, but still in its skin:

 

I always use more than one clove per carrot because we're going to roast these unpeeled garlic cloves so that the inside is soft and creamy, with each clove being essentially a little sachet of roast garlic puree and absolutely delicious.  I know that I'll eat half of them before they get to the soup. 

 

Put the carrot chunks in a bowl with the unpeeled garlic cloves, add a glug of olive oil, salt and black pepper, and toss the carrot chunks and unpeeled garlic cloves into a roasting tin.  You do want the unpeeled cloves oiled.  It sounds like madness, but it makes a difference.

 

Roast the carrots for around 40- 45 minutes. 

The carrots need to be soft enough to be mashable, and are even better if beginning to char ever so slightly on the outside;  the garlic cloves need to be squashy when you press them, but not burnt. 

In my experience, the carrot can take about five to ten minutes longer than the garlic to get to the right state, so for absolute perfection, you could add the garlic cloves to the roasting tin about five to ten minutes after the carrots have been put into the oven and leave the carrots in for 45 minutes in total.  If you need to do something else and not fuss about the timing, it's absolutely fine to roast both for the slightly shorter period of time.

If you're using a fresh chilli, I'd add strips in around the same time that you add the garlic (I haven't tried this with fresh chilli yet, but you don't want it burnt to a crisp; I'd imagine that charred would be fine).




While the carrots are in the oven, make cashew nut butter.


Put your cashew nuts onto a small baking dish and stick them into the oven with the carrots for around ten to fifteen minutes.  You need to be careful not to burn them.  They should go in looking rather anemic and come out looking golden-brown.

The picture shows the cashew nuts after roasting.






Making cashew-nut butter is very simple, and totally bizarre.  You will put the cashews in a blender of some sort - I used an ordinary Kenwood Chef Mini - and grind and blend them until they turn into something like peanut butter.  The blending process seems to beat up the nuts until oil starts coming out of them.




The pictures to the right show the stages that the cashew nut crumbs go through as you blend.

 

At first the cashews make very a very fine breadcrumb texture




.After about three minutes, the fine breadcrumb texture begins to clag-up a little bit, looking like small bits of rubber, making bigger crumbs and sticking to the sides.  Keep blending and pushing the mixture down onto the blades.


 

After about seven to ten minutes, the mixture has the consistency of very dry plasticine and falls apart very easily when you try to shape it.  At this stage you need to add a very little olive oil - around a teaspoon, and blend to mix it in.  The oil instantly transforms the mixture; the more oil you add, the slacker the result.  I want to make quenelles out of these, so I'm careful to add the oil a drop at a time.
 

 

This picture shows the cashew-nut mixture after the oil has been added.  The mixture is not paler in reality but, interestingly, the shinyness of the mixture with added oil meant that more of the flash was reflected back to the camera and the whole picture became much paler as a result. I've reduced the brightness as much as I can so that you can see the texture. 

The mixture is pretty much like a smooth peanut butter, and firm enough to hold its shape when you quenelle it.

 

The carrots will probably have finished roasting by now, as well.  

 

 

Put all of the carrot chunks into a saucepan, and add the roasted garlic and the dry chilli, if you are using that. 

 

This bit is messy. Using a very sharp knife, chop off the end of one of your squashy roasted garlic cloves.  Squeeze the the soft puree inside the peel out onto the carrots in the saucepan.  Lick your fingers and repeat with the rest of the cloves.

 

When you've got as much roasted garlic into the pan as possible, use a stick blender to blend the garlic, carrot and chilli together.  Add the chicken or vegetable stock as you proceed, until you've got the consistency you want.  

 

With the amount of carrots shown in the picture at the top, I used about 400 ml of stock to get a thick soup that I could pour.

 

Reheat the soup in the saucepan, taste and add salt and pepper as necessary.

 

Place a quenelle (or spoonful, if you're in a hurry) of the cashew-nut butter into the centre of your soup dish.  Pour the hot carrot soup over the cashew nut butter and squeeze a quarter or a half of a lime onto the top of that. 

 

Don't stir the lime in - part of the joy of this soup is that not every mouthful contains the acidic lime; the lime is used as a condiment rather than an ingredient.  

 

Eat the soup with a small portion of the cashew nut butter in every spoonful - fantastic!  I like to eat it with rice cakes.

 

Green pea soup

I've been doing something like this for some time, but a friend asked me for recipes using thyme, and thyme works well here.  I started off doing this with left over veggie, but now I buy stuff specifically to make it.

Ingredients

These are terribly fluid; the method works with almost any vegetables.  I think that this particular mix of vegetables works quite well.  This will probably make 3 - 4 servings (depending on how much liquid you use).

• A 500g bag of fresh peas
• Asparagus (yes, I know.  It's not a waste of asparagus to put it in a soup, though!)
• One onion or
• One leek or both
• About 100g of smoked bacon (or half a pack)
• Olive oil 
• Chicken stock - I use the stockpots and make up to 500 mL; you could use one stock cube if you like
• A few sprigs of fresh thyme (see picture underneath)

You do need a stick blender for this (although I expect you could tip the soup into an ordinary blender).

The peas need to be podded.  This is what 500g of podded peas looks like:

And here's how much thyme to use:

You need to strip the thyme leaves from the thyme stems, but don't worry if a few soft stems are included - it all gets whizzed up at the end, anyway.

Method

• Cut the bacon rashers into 1 cm strips and put them in a cold saucepan, turning the heat on under them. 

 I do this on an electric stove that heats up slowly, so I turn it to high.  If you're using gas, I think you'd probably need to do it on a lower heat - say, medium to low.  You want the fat to come out of the bacon bits.

• When the fat has come out of the bacon bits, add a glug or two of olive oil, and add the chopped onion and / or leek. Saute until soft, stirring all the time. 

 I usually use both! I was thinking last time that it would be perfectly OK just to use the leek, though, if you have a large one.  This is sauteeing, not frying - you're just softening the alliums, and driving a bit of water off to concentrate the flavour.  It won't hurt, though, if the onions pick up brown specks.

• Add 500 mL of chicken stock and the thyme leaves, and let the mixture simmer for five minutes or so. 

• Add the chopped asparagus and peas and let the mixture simmer for another five to ten minutes.

You might want to add some more water or stock at this stage - I usually add 300 - 500 mL of water.  You need to taste if you're thinking about adding more stock, because there is a real danger of making the soup too salty.  The bacon and the chicken stock already used make it quite salty - if you're using homemade stock, though (made in the old fashioned way by boiling up the left over roast chicken carcass from Sunday), it might not be salty enough, and you'll need to add some extra salt.

You'll get something that looks like this:

It's quite thick with vegetables. 

• Use a stick blender to puree everything in the pan.  Everything.

What you will see is something that looks like this:

And that's your soup.  When I made it so that I could take pictures, I'd forgotten to get bread, so I served it with some grated hard goats cheese:

But I think it's probably best with a roll and butter.  It's even better the next day, kept in the fridge overnight and reheated.  It also freezes quite well.

Variation

I haven't done this because it seems like too much faff, but if I had the tuits, I'd take the bacon out after having fried it and before adding the onions, or some of the bacon anyway, and add the bacon bits back in at the end after pureeing the vegetables. 

More foil flavours

After the last post, a couple of people suggested different sets of flavours.  It's important to come up with the right balance of acidity and salt to cut through the potential blah-egginess of the salmon, but I've had a think.  I'll add extra flavours here as I test them out.

Salmon with rosemary in foil

Rosemary is great but you have to be careful not to add too much, to prevent the foil parcel becoming, essentially, a spa bath.  You'll also have to add extra salt.  Rosemary also needs something smooth and creamy and fatty to counteract its harsher edges; here, that's butter.

Ingredients

These are all for one serving

• somewhere between a hazlenut-sized knob of butter and a walnut-sized knob of butter.  Nearer a walnut is better, but you might have dietary considerations
• sea salt
• crushed black peppercorns
• about a tablespoon (before chopping) of fresh rosemary leaves
• a dry, lemony white wine e.g. pinotage rather than chardonnay - 50 ml
• One salmon fillet

As before, get a 30 cm^2 square of foil.  Take the knob of butter and grease the centre of the foil with about half of that; reserve the rest for later.

Put the salmon fillet on the centre of the foil, diagonally.  Put little nibbets of the rest of the knob of butter over the top of the fillet.  Scatter a good pinch of sea salt over the fillet, and a good grind or two of the pepper. 

Chop the rosemary leaves quite finely and scatter them over the top of the fillet (the 'lazy' method is simply to use a pair of scissors and snip the leaves onto the top of the fillet, but I'm not sure that this is actually less work).

Pour 50 ml of the white wine around the fillet, rather than over the fillet.  You could use a little more if you can get your silver foil to contain it.  You don't want to pour it over the top of the fillet because you want the butter to melt into the fillet and into the wine to make the sauce.

What you have should now look like this:

See the butter on top of the fillet, there?  The salt crystals have already started melting in.  You can just about see the white wine, if you squint.

Fold the corners up to make a dumpy handbag, as before, and cook as before.  You might want to let the dumpy handbag sit for fifteen minutes to half an hour before cooking to let the bruised and cut rosemary release more of its scent, and to let the salmon marinate a little bit.

Eat with boiled new potatotoes, as before.

Salmon and lime in foil

Salmon in foil

This is a method of cooking salmon that can work for one serving, or ten.  The lime part of the title refers to an unusual set of flavours - fusion, probably - that I'm using in this recipe; I might do a later post suggesting other combinations of ingredients that also work well.  The foil method is perfect for all sorts of small, chunky fillets of fish and shellfish, although different species of fish may need different times.


Ingredients

• One salmon fillet per person
• One lime per two people
• Two - three spring onions per person
• Light soy sauce.  It's important to use light soy sauce here rather than dark, for the saltiness
• Sesame oil (roast is fine - it's what I use)
• Some sort of flavourless oil, such as corn oil.

What you do

First, you heat the oven to around 200 C.  To be quite honest, you could turn it down a bit.  Salmon doesn't need very much cooking.  Put a baking tray in the oven to get hot with the oven, so that the foil parcels you are going to make are put straight onto an already-hot tray.

While the oven is heating, prepare the foil parcels by doing the following:

• Take the rind off the lime.  You can do this by using a grater, or use a dedicated lemon de-rinder.  There's a picture of one underneath.  They don't cost much and they're absolutely brilliant. Put the rind to one side.
• Squeeze the juice from the lime into a small bowl or container.  Add a tablespoon (15 ml) of light soy sauce and one teaspoon of sesame oil.  This makes enough sauce for two - three fillets; you can keep any left over in a sealed container in the fridge for a few days (probably maximum three to four days).
• Top and tail the spring onion and chop the stem into 1 cm lengths, and slice the bulb into half cm slices. 

Here's a picture of the ingredients before the spring onions are chopped.  The lemon de-rinder is shown at the right of the picture.  I bought mine from Tesco.

• Take some foil - minimum 30 cm by 30 cm. 

You should probably brush a little of the non flavoured oil onto the centre of the foil at this point, just under the place where you'll lay the salmon fillet.  I forgot to do this last time I cooked salmon like this, and a little bit of the salmon had stuck to the foil when I unfolded the foil parcels; that's the reason for brushing with oil before cooking.  You can use a pastry brush, or your fingers, to spread the oil over the foil, and you'll need less than a teaspoon of it.

• Turn the corners of the foil up so that it makes a shallow dish.   
• Put the salmon on the oiled foil, diagonally,  and add two - three tablespoons of the soy sauce mixture. 
• Scatter the shredded rind of lime on and around the salmon. 
• Scatter two to three chopped spring onions, similarly. 

You should get something that looks like this:

• Now you make a domed parcel, to seal the salmon in and allow some space for the salmon to cook in the flavoured steam provided by the lime juice, soy sauce, rind and spring onion. 

I do this by bringing up the sides and folding them over. Here:

Then I bring the ends up and fold them over, making a blunt handbag shape like this:

You need to be careful to make sure that there are no little gaps where the steam can escape. 

• Now, take the heated baking tray out of the oven and plonk the parcel onto it.

The reason for heating the tray is to stop the bottom of the salmon getting soggy, especially if you've left the skin on.  You'll probably hear the parcel hiss a little, if the baking tray is hot enough. 

You can do similar domed-parcel techniques with baking paper for all sorts of fish, especially whole fish, but I prefer foil, especially for salmon, because of the immediacy of the heat transfer - I think it makes a better skin.

• Put the salmon parcel in the oven for ten - fifteen minutes. 

In my most recent cooking of this, I left the parcel for fifteen minutes, and I think the salmon was a bit overcooked.  About 12 minutes is probably best; more if you've lowered the temperature.  This is one recipe where you need to know your own oven very well and make the appropriate adjustments.

When you open the parcel (be careful - the foil will be hot), it will look like this:

The sauce is delicious.  I've served this with boiled new potatoes, but it might also go well with noodles. Use a serving spatula to lever the salmon off the foil and put it on a plate, and then tip the foil up to spill the sauce over the salmon and whichever carbohydrate you are using.

I'm pretty certain that you could also use the cook-in-foil method on a barbecue.

Fish Curry

A kind of Goan Fish Curry

I call this a Goan fish curry because it is a curry, has fish in it, and, whenever I cook it, I look up these two recipes which are both titled 'Goan Fish Curry', the first by the ever knowleadgeable Anjum Anand and the second by Felicity Cloake*. 

Now, I know nothing about Goan Fish Curries apart from what these two lasses tell me.  I tend to get them confused with Thai Fish Curries and so you can call this a Thai Fish Curry, if you want.  It's a fish curry.  I like it.

Anyway, when I made it this time, I had a little bit of the paste left over from making aubergines and green beans a couple of days before; and that contains pureed fresh lemongrass, which is kind of a Thai thing.  I'm going to recreate how I made it today, but everything is very fluid.  I think we might just call today's effort Coconut Fish Curry.

Ingredients

For the paste:

• Two to three shallots or a small onion
• Three - four hearts of lemon grasss
• Two - three chillies, depending on their hotness
• A thumb sized piece of ginger (2 cm cubed)
• Five or six cloves of garlic
• Two teaspoons of freshly roast cumin
• One teaspoon of powdered coriander (more, if you like coriander)
• One teaspoon of tumeric
• Two teaspoons of garam masala

Whizz this all up in a small blender with a splash of water.  If thie ingredients given vary a little from the paste shown in the Green Beans and Aubergine recipe, that gives you some idea of the boundaries of variability. 

You'll need about half this paste for four helpings or the 500g of fish which I have used in the rest of this.

Spicing in addition

Because I felt like it, I added

• three teaspoons of black mustard seed,
• about 5 cm of cinammon stick
• a desert spoon of amchur, which is dried mango powder. 

The amchur is there to add sourness instead of the vinegar that Felicity Cloake recommends; it adds a lovely, cheek-sucking sourness, but you're definitely not going to find it in Tesco.   I usually add it to the fish curries.  Here's some pictures of the amchur, and the mustard seed and cinammon (fear my use of the Oxford comma):

 For the sauce

• One small tetrapack ( ~ 300g?) of pulped tomato, or two tomatoes grated, or half a tub of baby plum tomatoes chopped finely
• One tin of coconut cream
• One onion (or another onion)
• Coconut oil (optional)
• Corn oil or other 'flavourless' oil e.g. groundnut oil.
• Fish sauce (possibly optional, but I think it's really quite essential - I use Blue Dragon)

Fish

As Felicity Cloake says, you can do almost any white fish here.  The reason I started doing these fish curries is that in my local supermarket you regularly get packets of hake marked down from £4.00 to £1.00, so I grab a couple of packets of those and freeze them until I need them.  Here's a picture of the two packets I used today:

Actually, that's a picture of most of the sauce ingredients, only I changed my mind at the last minute and used a tin of coconut cream instead of the tetra pack. 

The two packets of fish probably come to about 500g in total.  You could use more, but if you used less then you'd probably need less sauce and should use the smaller pack of coconut cream.

Method.

Put a glug of coconut oil (if you're using it) and another glug of corn oil or flavourless oil in a saucepan, and put the saucepan on the heat. 

When the oil is well hot, throw in chopped onion and let that fry for around fifteen minutes, to let the water come out of the onion and let the carbohydrates caramelise.  The saucepan doesn't need to be on top heat for this slow frying, but the heat under the saucepan should be turned up again for the next bit if you've turned it down to fry the onion more slowly.

Throw in the mustard seed and cinammon stick (or whatever whole spices you are using) with the oil hot, and stir for thirty seconds.  Then add the paste, and turn the heat down again if necessary.  Add the spoonful of amchur a minute or so after the paste.  Keep stirring - the mixture will probably 'catch' on the bottom; that's OK because a little bit of catching adds to the flavour.  Keep stirring to loosen the catching so it doesn't burn.  If the catching bothers you, add the amchur later, as you add the tomatoes, because I think the powdered spices are responsible for the catching. 

Fry for two - three minutes or until the oil starts coming out of the mixture and all the water has evaporated.

Throw in your pulped tomato, which ever version you are using, and stir and cook for another two to three minutes.  Add the creamed coconut and the fish sauce. 

This is where I have to make a warning; the fish sauce probably is essential, but be careful not to add too much.  I nearly did that this evening, when I put in a large 'glug,' which, in hindsight, I estimate to be about 30 ml - you're probably best off starting with half that, or two to three teaspoons (15 ml).  Fish sauce is smelly, but a little bit of the type of smelly that fish sauce is enhances the flavour of the other stuff in the mix.  The smelly works best when the amount added means that your tastebuds are just under the edge of knowing it is there; add too much and you've got something that smells and tastes like bad socks.

Let this mixture simmer away for ten minutes (turn the heat down again), stirring all the time, reducing in volume.

Then add your chopped fish.  One of the problems with the cheap hake is that it needs to be checked for bones and the skin taken off.  That's not difficult; just tedious.  Here's a piece of hake half-way through the deskinning:

What I would do now, after having separated enough skin from the fish, is press down firmly on the white bit and just pull at the skin; it comes away quite cleanly.

Here's a picture of the roughly 500g of white fish skinned and chopped:

Add the fish to the tomato and coconut curry mixture.

Let the fish simmer away for ten minutes or so, so that the fish is cooked through, stirring, then turn the heat down to keep the curry warm while you cook your rice.

I eat it with a dollop of yoghurt, but then I eat everything with a dollop of yoghurt:

I would have squeezed half a lemon over, if I had remembered.

And that's your basic fish curry.  It might be Goan.  It might be Thai.  It certainly contains coconut.


*If you haven't come across Felicity Cloake yet, then you are missing a treat.  She approaches recipes with the zeal of a postgraduate scientist who likes her food and is being paid to do what she would do anyway; she writes columns in which she tries to distill the essence of a dish, and some of those columns have ended up in a boo, Perfect, which is kind of a short-cut to everything you wanted to know about cooking.  My only gripe with this book is that it actuallly doesn't contain everything you need, althouigh you certainly need what is contained within it; it needs a second and third volume to cover everything that Felicity's investigated - a lot of the stuff I've found useful (a perfect beef wellington, for example) is still only findable online.

Butternut squash, ham and feta pasties

Sorry for the long absence.  This recipe isn't particularly anti-cholesterol, except for the huge quantities of vegetables and therefore soluble vegetable fibre involved, but it does include a very large amount of sage, and I'm sure that that's good for something.

The resultant pasties are, however, very very tasty.  Very tasty, and the key to that is in the industrial quantities of sage that you need to use: don't stint on the sage!  Actually, that's pretty much my guideline for life.  

OK.  So, what you need are the following things (I'm using my usual philosophy of going for one of everything, but if you do that you might find that you have a lot of the filling left over, in which case, go for two of the packets of pastry):

Ingredients

• One onion
• One packet of feta - doesn't have to be particularly greek.  'Salad cheese' from Sainsbury or Tesco is fine.
• About 250 g of ham.  Actually, sorry, this isn't a 'one'. The cheapest (and best) way I've found to do this is to get a packet of ham trimmings or ask for ham trimmings at a deli counter.  You're going to cut it up anyway, so it doesn't matter if it's not pretty when you buy it.  If you get sliced ham from a deli, ask for it to be cut quite thickly
• One packet of fresh sage leaves.  Alternatively, go to the bush in your herb garden and cut off around 20 or so (if in doubt, cut more) of the medium sized leaves
• One butternut squash, medium
• One packet of shortcrust pastry (or two)
• Some olive oil
• An egg
• Some sea salt
• Pepper

You do probably also need some specialised equipment ie a rolling pin and a pastry brush and a potato peeler.

Method

1. Roasting the squash with the sage

Switch the oven to around 200 C and leave it to heat up while you get the squash ready.

Prepare your butternut squash.  You do this by peeling it first (hence the potato peeler). 


Using a fairly hefty knife, slice the peeled squash in half, vertically and use a spoon and a knife to scoop out all of the seeds and fibrous bits (you do need to get rid of the seeds, but don't worry too much if a couple of the fibres are left).  This can get quite messy.

Then dice the flesh into 1 - 2 cm cubes, or as near as you can.  

Put the cubes into a large bowl, large enough so you can stir the cubes with a spoon without spilling the cubes out.

Take your packet of fresh sage leaves and shred the leaves.  You do this by putting four or five leaves on top of each other, rolling them into a sort of tiny swiss roll, and then cutting strips off the roll about 1 mm thick. 

Put all of the shreds into the bowl with the butternut squash cubes.

Add a glug of olive oil to the bowl and a hefty pinch of sea salt and a substantial grind of pepper, and stir everything up so that all of the cubes are coated in oil and shredded sage. 

Tip all of this into a roasting tin and stick in the oven for 20 - 30 mins, until the cubes are soft (they'll mash if you press them but still have a little resistance) and perhaps charred at the edges (the charring adds sweetness). 

Take the roasting dish out of the oven and let the butternut squash cool.  You can do this the day before if you want.

This is what the squash will look like when cooled and put back into the bowl:

2. Making the filling

Chop the onion up finely.  Tip that into another bowl.

Chop the ham up so that it's in 0.5 - 1 cm cubes.  Add that to the bowl with the onion. 

Take the packet of feta and chop that up into 0.5 - 1 cm cubes (it will crumble - don't worry about that) and add those to the bowl with the ham and the onion. 

You don't have to chop these things in this order, incidentally; you just need all the chopped stuff in a bowl, to which you will add the now-cold butternut squash, and stir. 

Stir quite roughly so that some of the squash disintegrates, to give some sort of cohesion to the mixture.

3. Making the pasties

Dust your work surface with flour and unroll your pastry onto it.  I then use a rolling pin to roll out and  flatten the pastry slightly. 

Get a sideplate and place it upside down on the pastry and cut around it.  You need to do this as many times as you can from your one roll of pastry - I usually get about three out of one roll, and I then roll out the left over pastry again to get a fourth.

Break the egg into a small bowl or cup, add a splash of water (one tablespoon or less) and beat with a fork to make an eggy mixture.  You are going to use this to seal your pasties and also to brush onto the top to make them brown.

Take one of your circles of pastry.  Brush eggy mixture over the top side, and then add two to three tablespoons of filling mixture to one side of the circle.  Like this:

You might need to add some more eggy mixture to the edges before you fold it over.  The eggy mixture helps stop the pastry going soggy a little bit, and acts like a glue when you fold the pastry over.

 Fold the pastry over so you have a bulgy semi circle, and crimp the edges so that they are stuck together.

You can find all sorts of videos to show you how to crimp the edges.  I just use a fork and press it down quite hard.  You'll find your pastry stretching a little over the filling - that's OK.  Just try not to break it.

Put your uncooked pasty onto a non-stick baking tray (or add some baking parchment if your baking tray is crusty).  Brush some egg wash over the top,  and use a knife to cut one or two slits into the top of the pasty to let the steam escape while the filling cooks.  Repeat with the rest of your pasty circles.

Put the baking tray into the oven at 200 C / Gas mark 6 for about ten minutes, and then turn the oven down to 180 / Gas mark 4, and leave for another 25 - 30 minutes.  Make sure you check, though, and take the pasties out if it looks like the pastry is burning.

Take the pasties out and let them cool on a wire tray before eating.  They should look like this:

It is important to let them cool before eating because the filling gets very hot.  They're actually best quite cold. 

Here's another picture of a different batch:

I'm not very good at applying egg wash.

The butternut squash prepared in this way can also be used to make a brilliant risotto.  I'll blog that soon.