Oh dear oh dear oh dear. The demon drink. The evils of alcohol. After last weekend and my hideous behaviour at and after an anti-Bestival brunch I suddenly understand why drinking is bad for you. This revelation has nothing to do with the shakes that lasted until Tuesday or the kettle drum that boomed away behind my eyes but more to do with the huge scratch across my BlackBerry screen and the fact I am no longer in possession of an iPod*.
After heavy drinking on Friday with my ex-boss and people I used to work with, I rolled up late to the Windsor Castle in Notting Hill. It’s a lovely old pub but if you sit all day topping up your blood-alcohol level with bottles of Prosseco its tiny doors and steep steps prove difficult. They also seem to only have one ice bucket so knocked us up a makeshift one during a warm-wine emergency.

Booze flowed, cigarettes were smoked at an alarming rate, I knocked over two full glasses. Everyone else enjoyed their food but my burger was mediocre though that’s probably because all I could taste was the fur on my tongue. After at least two romantic indiscretions (mine) were accidentally revealed it was time to go. Unfortunately it wasn’t time to go home, it was time to go on to an old school friend’s where I proceeded to drink yet another bottle of fizz while everyone else sobered up. I think this is where I crossed the line from ‘annoying drunk’ to ‘please, when is she leaving?’
Lesson learnt. Sort of.
Anyway, this is where lasagne comes in. Benaisha, Cookie and Katie decided to whip up some dinner – I was far too much of a mess to do anything apart from really badly peel some squash so just got in the way and took photos instead.
Butternut squash and goat’s cheese lasagne
I’ll warn you now that most of this is guess work, ingredients gleaned from looking at the (mostly blurry) pictures. I wasn’t really in any sort of state to take notes.
Stuff you need:
A lasagne dish or similar
Pasta sheets or whatever they’re called
Passata
Goat’s cheese
Spinach
A butternut squash
Garlic (I’ll be honest, I have no real idea what they did with this so I’m going to improvise)
Salt and pepper
Parmesan
Heat the oven to (maybe) 180°c while you peel your squash, hopefully a bit better than I did. Scrape out the seedy bit in the middle – shown here in case you do this wasted and can’t remember where the seeds are…
Cut this into chunks and toss in some olive oil with salt and pepper. I think that the garlic, finely chopped, was thrown in here as well.
Stick this in the oven for about 20 minutes. I’m not sure what the green is – do whatever you think best.
Once this has cooked wilt a few good handfuls of spinach. It’ll seem like loads but it’s not, IT’S NOT!
Now comes the exciting bit. (It was all quite exciting for me, I was hammered and listening to Magic FM.) Start your first lasagne layer. It doesn’t have to be neat or tidy. Cookie realised later that you’re meant to semi cook the pasta first but it was fine so those instructions were clearly absolute bollocks designed to take up time that could be spent doing something more fucking interesting than half boiling pasta.
On top of the pasta shove on some spinach, some squash, a generous dollop of passata and a bit of crumbled up goat’s cheese.
More pasta.
Once you’re all layered up cover the top with some more pasta and then a big duvet of parmesan.
This went into the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes. I think. Anyway when it looks cooked it probably is.

*iPod has now found its way home though someone has clearly been listening to my “ironic” goldmine of novelty Cuban pop.