Jamie Oliver's pumpkin rotolo - sort of

My quick tour of Port Fairy did involve a lot of eating and as I said yesterday, we also squeezed in a bit of cooking together which is actually something we've never done. Living in different states, when we do catch up it's usually for occasions or we're showing each other the best of our home towns and end up eating out. This time was different.

We're both in love with Jamie Oliver so it seemed fitting that we try a recipe from his new show Save with Jamie. I'd seen him make the Pumpkin Rotolo a few weeks before and loved the look of it and The Kiwi agreed it would be perfect. That morning she stocked up on the ingredients at the Melbourne Market while I was on my flight and come the afternoon, we were ready to get busy.

Now this is not a quick meal to make. It's not all that difficult but there are a lot of steps involved and it certainly helped that there were four hands not two. I did learn a great trick for cooking pumpkin. All you do is prick it all over with a fork then throw it in the oven at about 180C fan-forced for 1.5 hours. Then once it has cooled enough to handle, you slice it open and the soft flesh can be scooped out.

There's no peeling or worrying about the knife slipping all over the place with the tough skin.

If you've never heard of rotolo before (I'm not sure if it's a Jamie thing or a real thing) basically it's a cross between lasagne and cannelloni. You wrap up your filling in sliced lasagne sheets and place the rolls on their ends in a pot of sauce. You could adapt this recipe to any sort of filling or sauce you like. I do love a good spinach and ricotta filling with a simple tomato sauce.

When dinner came out of the oven we weren't too sure we liked the look of it. The rolls were a little crunchy and dry on top but nice and soft on the inside. After tasting them, I said I liked the crunchy bits but The Kiwi disagreed. We both commented that the pumpkin was a bit over-powering and the rolls could have done with less filling and a little more sauce.

The next morning, I gave The Kiwi her thank you present - a copy of Jamie's book. After a flick through, we both wanted to see what Jamie's version looked like. It was then that The Kiwi noticed the recipe called for 1.2kg of pumpkin. The recipe that we'd printed out from the Channel 10 website said 2kg. That explained our comments on the overpowering pumpkin and over-supply of filling.

If you follow the recipe as it should be - here's the correct one - then you should end up with a delicious meal that will feed at least 6-8 people with a nice side salad or bowl of veges or mix it up and fill the rolls with whatever you like. I would recommend adding a little extra sauce. Enjoy!

What about you? What would you stuff them with?