Better sleep Chicken & pearl barley broth
A deep bowl of pulled chicken, barley and root veg; the batch-cook that owns winter evenings.
Roast squash & spinach polenta bake with cottage cheese
Soft-set polenta enriched with cottage cheese and spinach, baked under caramelised butternut squash, melted cheddar and toasted pumpkin seeds.
Ingredients
Servings 4
Quantities scaled from the original (4 servings).
Tick ingredients off as you gather them.
Method
- Step 1
Heat the oven to 200°C fan. Toss the squash with 1 tbsp oil on a tray and roast 25 minutes until soft and browned at the edges.
- Step 2
Meanwhile fry the leek in the remaining oil 6 minutes. Add the garlic and spinach, wilt 2 minutes, then tip into a sieve and press out the liquid.
- Step 3
Bring the milk to a simmer in a large pan. Whisk in the polenta and cook 4 minutes, stirring, until thick. Take off the heat.
- Step 4
Stir in the cottage cheese, eggs, nutmeg, half the cheddar, the leek and spinach and plenty of black pepper. Spread into an oiled 20 x 30cm dish.
- Step 5
Scatter over the squash, remaining cheddar and pumpkin seeds. Bake 25 minutes until set and golden. Rest 5 minutes, cut into squares and serve with salad.
Make it work for your circle: cooking for someone in
perimenopause? Every recipe on this site explains its own "why", so
you don't have to; just cook it. Doubling the vegetables never hurts.
Nutrition per serving
| Calories | 620 kcal |
|---|---|
| Protein | 33g |
| Carbohydrates | 62g |
| – of which sugars | 18g |
| Fibre | 7g |
| Fat | 27g |
| – of which saturates | 11g |
| – of which omega-3 | 0.2g |
| Calcium | 540mg |
| Iron | 4.5mg |
| Salt | 0.9g |
New
Try it
Like this? Get a whole week planned around you.
Tell the Peri Planner how you're feeling and it builds your personalised menu, this recipe included.
Cooked it, rated it
Be the first to review this recipe. Ratings from members appear here, and once they're real they feed the recipe's published rating; we don't invent numbers in the meantime.
Keep cooking
You might also like
Better sleep 
Banana oat pancakes with warm blueberries
Three-ingredient-adjacent pancakes for breakfast-at-dinner nights, topped with warm berries.
Chocolate chia pots with raspberries
Cocoa chia pudding on soya milk with raspberries; pudding that ends the day quietly.