Brown-butter pumpkin with goat's cheese and sage

This is not a ground-breaking recipe. There are no ingredients here that will have you flicking over to Google, unless you are particularly uninitiated in food, in which case I’d wonder how you ended up on this website. Rather, this is a recipe that was borne of the contents of my fridge, and the reminder given to me by a sensational dinner at Skye Gyngell’s new restaurant, Spring, that delicious food doesn’t need to be complicated.

I’m all for weird and new ingredients. I think experimentation and exploration are what make food exciting. To those who whinge about recipes that include an ingredient they’ve never heard of I will point out that it wasn’t long ago that spaghetti was seen as something exotic and foreign.

But there’s also something heartening about cooking something simple, easy and familiar that is nevertheless deeply satisfying and slightly different to what you might cook every day.

This is a dish for autumn. Eat it as a starter or as a side dish to something like a pork chop.