Thursday, August 18, 2005

My brother's recipe for baked cauliflower-cheese

INGREDIENTS:
Lots of butter
Blue cheese
Cheddar cheese
One pint heavy cream
Flour
Milk
One tbsp English mustard
Oh yes, and a cauliflower

PROCEDURE
1. Heat some butter in a deep frying pan, and, when it's melted, add some flour and stir it in with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring until the flour has all been absorbed by the butter (you'll have a sort of thick paste in the frying pan). If you run out of flour and it still looks a bit wet, add more flour. If it looks a bit dry, add more butter. Continue until you get bored and/or you run out of butter.

2. Pour in a bit of milk and stir until it's absorbed. Quickly decide that milk is inadequate for your purposes, and switch to heavy cream. Stir into the butter/flour paste until you have a large quantity of thick, gloopy white paste.

3. Gloat for a while about how smooth and creamy the sauce is.

4. Still stirring maniacally, start adding pieces of blue cheese and cheddar cheese into the mix. The blue:cheddar proportion depends on how strong you want the sauce to be, so it's important to keep on dipping the spoon in to taste and check. Every time you taste, you must sigh, "Oh, this is so good! It's so rich!"

5. Keep on going until you've run out of cheese, and/or your deep frying pan is completely full of sauce. It should be even thicker and gloopier, with a deep yellow sheen of grease whenever you stir it.

6. Chop your cauliflower into florets and boil them for a minute or two until they're slightly cooked; drain.

7. Add a tablespoon of mustard to the sauce and stir it in. Taste again and practically faint with rapture. Take a picture of yourself posing as you stir the glorious sauce.

8. Put the cooked cauliflower florets into an oven safe baking dish and pour the creamy sauce on top of them. If you've done this right the dish should be like an ocean of sauce with a few lonely cauliflowers poking out here and there. Top with a few breadcrumbs (which will immediately soak with grease for that golden crispy effect).

9. Scrape the last little bits of sauce from the pan with a spoon and eat them.

10. Bake in a hot oven for half an hour or until golden brown and bubbling and your whole kitchen is full of a tantalizing caramelized cheese aroma.

11. Serve. If your guests are at all calorie-conscious, tell them that you used skim milk.


1 Comments:

Blogger MJ said...

Oh YUMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!! Who'da thought that one could make cauliflower into a heart attack casserole?

2:21 PM  

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