Experimenting with butternut and goat cheese

So there I was, minding my own business, doing the usual grocery shopping rounds up and down the supermarket isles. A few steps into the freezer section and I stopped cold! Is that?… Could it be?… IT IS!!! I had found goat cheese. And it was the last little 100g pack sitting perfectly in it’s lane between other overstuffed lanes with cheeses that had fancy names. This one was just plain and simple; goat cheese.

text
I love the colours

If you’re wondering why I’m fussing about goad cheese and you haven’t had it, you need to taste it. My first encounter with goat cheese was about 8 years ago. It was a topping on a pizza, just a few small chunks. Every bite that had goat cheese was unlike anything I had ever had. So so good! That became the only pizza I had in that restaurant, with extra goat cheese every time!   

I was abroad at the time. I had forgotten all about that pizza with goat cheese until I saw it earlier this month. Which reminds me, I have a pizza post to make. But lets stay focused,… goat cheese. I had to buy it! I was expensive as you can imagine. The amount you pay for the size you get is on the high side but if you think about how much milk you get from a goat compared to a cow, then how much of it you need to collect to get that piece of cheese, it adds up.

I arrived home on a high of inspiration. I had a butternut that had been sitting on the counter, just waiting for me to do something with it. I imagined the sweet roasted flavours of the butternut with honey and butter and a sprinkle of crunchy onions, goat cheese, and the artist in me added chopped chives for their colour. Just seemed appropriate, the green speckles on the white goat cheese against the earthy burnt orange of the roasted butternut. It looked awesome in my head, I could taste it and it was delicious!

So I made it happen…

text
I used the top half of the butternut, cut it into bite sized pieces, sprinkled a bit of salt on them, then melted some butter and mixed it with honey and used that to coat/baste the butternut

2 tablespoons butter, melted
4 teaspoons honey

Toss the butternut in half the honey and butter mix till evenly coated. Place in an oven pan lined with foil. Preheat oven to 180°C. Bake for 30 min or till tender and cooked through. Baste with the remaining honey and butter half way through cooking.

text
while the butternut was cooking, I chopped up a bit of goat cheese, onions and chives, put them together in a bowl and mixed. You don’t need a lot of this, just enough to accent the butternut
t
mixed and ready
20150220-experimenting-with-butternut-and-goat-cheese-3
and there is the butternut fresh out of the oven. That was my last piece of foil, it wasn’t enough to cover the whole pan but that was not going to stop me!
t
and there you have it
t
the colours just make you want to dig in!

It was delicious. very creamy combination. The goat cheese is creamy and so is the texture of the roasted butternut, so if you like creamy you’ll love this. But after a couple of bites I wanted something to break it up the creaminess a bit more, the onions were not enough. So it would make a great side dish,… just need to figure out what to serve it with. Got any suggestions? Let me know in the comments below!

About aika

Making, eating and sharing good food are a splendid way to start, brake and end a day! I post good eats on www.pendolamama.co.ke. Life is a feast, eat up!

__

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.