I love this butternut squash winter bake and find it such a great plant based dish to serve as either a main or a side dish during the colder months. There’s something really cosy about oven bakes, right? And this one is both healthy and filling and flavoured with harissa spice, which perks it up so nicely and makes the roasted vegetables and crispy chickpeas more exotic. This dish is vegan friendly, gluten and dairy free, making it a good one for people who are on a restricted diet.

Aside from prepping the veggies and cooking the quinoa, the bake mostly cooks itself in the oven, making this a pretty low effort meal. The tahini sauce is a great and super versatile sauce you can use over any vegetables and salads. I usually keep a jar of homemade tahini in my fridge to use on salads and the like as it is a healthy alternative to store-bought dressings (..and made from only a handful of simple ingredients!) If you’re not a fan of tahini, you can as an alternative use a dollop of creamy Greek yogurt instead and sprinkle some harissa spice on top of it.

The cooking instructions below go into detail on how to cook fluffy quinoa. It’s really simple and the key is leaving the quinoa to “fluff” in the pot with a lid after its done cooking. Ensure you have the right ratio of 1:2 quinoa to water (so 2 cups water to 1 cup uncooked quinoa), and once the water is gone lid goes on and heat goes off. This is the most important step to ensure fluffy and well cooked quinoa that does not have a grainy texture. So I included it in there, just to make sure… because undercooked quinoa that hasn’t been left to fluff is not awesome.