Winter Vegetable Crumble

As several of the book reviews on Amazon (both .com and .co.uk) mentioned the excellent Winter Vegetable Crumble, we thought we should give it a try. And in fact, it was very nice - though it wasn't as mind-blowing as you would expect after reading the reviews at Amazon.

I really loved two aspects: the crumble and the sauce. The crumble wasn't really crunchy, but I loved the flavour of the parmesan combined with ground hazelnuts (which we used as we ran out of ground almonds - try it, it's really an unusually successful accident!). And the sauce was just really good in taste.

The weak point were the veggies themselves. The recipe uses four different types of root vegetables, and you definitely didn't necessarily taste that; they all had more or less the same flavour and texture, and it didn't really help that they were all coated in sauce and buried in crumble. We had the dish as a main, but as the veggies were near indistinguishable, it was a bit one-dimensional as a single menu item. Next time, I would probably serve it as a side dish and not bother with a variety of half-used vegetables but just pick one or two.

Last, the minor issues: next to being nearly indistinguishable, the vegetables were also too soft - I would reduce their cooking time by several minutes, and also take into account how long they sit in the hot water before it starts boiling.* Also, we had to raise the oven temperature to 200°C to get everything baked and golden brown in 20 minutes.

The dish also contained bacon/pancetta cubes. They were nice, but not really necessary, and you can easily omit them to make the dish vegetarian.

(*) I'll have to admit, though, that this is exactly how I boil potatoes - put them into a pot, bring the water to a boil, and only then set the timer to 20 min.