It Ain't Easy Bein' Cheesy

Oh my. Three posts in one day. 'Has the boy no social life?' I hear you cry. Well, let's not get into that. I just wanted to make mention of yesterday's lunch. After Sis and I went and did some errands at Waitrose, Tesco and the bank, we stopped by Planter's restaurant again inside Tenterden Garden Centre. This place has excellent food and service and yesterday was no exception. I plumped for the cauliflower cheese. Oh, good choice! It was huge, almost hanging out of the large oval dish it was served in, and cooked with leek and onion in a divine cheese sauce. As if that weren't enough, along came the side dish of veggies which was almost as large and contained peas, carrots, Savoy cabbage, green beans and potatoes. Oh my. As I polished off my latte I thought, 'could life get much better than this?' and pretty much fell asleep as soon as we got home and had a three-hour nap. Wow.

Here's a recipe to try:

500g fresh cauliflower

2 leeks, chopped

2 onions, cut into quarters

1 vegetable stock cube

1 tbsp cornflour

1 tsp Dijon mustard

100g Cheddar Cheese, grated

1 tbsp chopped fresh chives

freshly ground black pepper

Cooking Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200C, 400F, Gas Mark 6.

Cut the cauliflower into florets and cook in a shallow pan of water with the leeks, onions and stock cube. Make sure the cauliflower is still fairly firm. There's nothing worse than mushy cauli.

Drain well and pour into an ovenproof dish.

In a saucepan, heat the milk to near boiling. Mix the cornflour with a little extra cold water, then whisk the cornflour into the hot milk along with the mustard and two-thirds of the cheese.

Simmer until the sauce has thickened, then pour the sauce over the vegetables.

Mix the remaining cheese with the chives, then season with black pepper and sprinkle over the vegetables and sauce.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes until brown and bubbly on top.

Hopefully, what you now have is something like this:

Genieße das Leben ständig!

Du bist länger tot als lebendig!