Honey Roast Pumpkins

Method

• This is a great dish to serve on its own or as an accompaniment to meat, chicken or fish.
• It's also very good if you have vegetarian friends over for dinner because you can put some cheese on top of it and that can be their meal while everybody else is tucking into roast beef or whatever.
• First peel the pumpkins.
• Then rub a gratin dish with some garlic - a fresh clove cut in half - and that way you get a lovely, pungent garlic flavour without an overpowering taste.
• You are going to roast the pumpkin with some turnip - just to offset its sweetness with a bit of bite from the turnip. The whole thing is pumped up with flavour from the honey, orange, garlic and bay leaves.
• Parboil the turnips because they take a lot longer to cook than the pumpkin does.
• Turnip is a notoriously difficult vegetable to get kids to eat, but somehow, mixed in with the lovely colour of the pumpkin, it doesn't seem so bad.
• To add even more colour and flavour, and a little bit of sweet to go with the savoury, put some orange zest in between the vegetables. Then make a sauce with the orange juice and honey and oil to roast them. The honey just gives the vegetables a lovely glaze and that spoonful of sugar which helps the medicine go down.
• And then that all gets poured over and you just toss the vegetables in it.
• Finally, put in a little bit of garlic. Leave the garlic as whole cloves, so that will impart the flavour and not make it too strong, and some bay leaves, which always go beautifully with the orange.
• Tuck those in there with a pinch of salt.
• That goes in the oven at about 180°C for about 25 minutes and about five minutes before it's finished cooking, pull it out, crumble the goat's cheese on top and let it melt.