Roasted butternut pumpkin with sage & macadamias

November 24, 2022

   

So here's the 'heftier side' we ate with our rhubarb-smothered haloumi: roasted butternut pumpkin topped with macadamia nuts, green olives and sage, all toasted in butter. (As with the fennel cacciatore, I chose green over kalamata olives as a personal preference.) Sage, butter and pumpkin are a pretty common combination, and I loved the extra toasty crunch of macadamias and piquance of olives in this version. The pumpkin's baking time was all I needed to get the haloumi recipe together, and we got two colourful and satisfying meals out of these two dishes for two people.

The red of the rhubarb and tomatoes, plus the green and gold here have me thinking that these two dishes could work well for a vegetarian Christmas meal. We'll definitely come back to both of them, regardless of what's on the menu on the 25th.

Roasted butternut pumpkin with sage & macadamias

(slightly adapted from Alice Zaslavsky's In Praise of Veg)

1 butternut pumpkin

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon salt

~1/3 cup olive oil

100g macadamia nuts, roughly chopped

80g butter

50g green olives, halved and pits removed

1 handful fresh sage leaves

Preheat an oven to 190°C. Line a large baking tray with paper.

Carefully slice the pumpkin in half lengthways. Scoop out the seeds. In the remaining hollow, mix together the sugar, salt and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Rub this mixture into the cut side of the pumpkin. Place the pumpkin pieces onto the baking tray, cut side down. Roast for 40-50 minutes, until tender.

When the pumpkin has about 15 minutes to go, place the macadamias, olives, butter, 1 teaspoon olive oil and sage leaves into a small saucepan. Heat, stirring regularly, until the butter is melted, the macadamias are golden and the sage is a bit crispy. 

To serve, spoon the macadamia-butter mixture over the cut-side-up pumpkin halves.