Last Night's Dinner 20

A cheating but still very delicious cauliflower (and other vegetables) cheese.

Hello everyone! Another simple recipe post for you. But before I get into it, a couple of reminders. The subscription offer ends tomorrow (I have already sent books out this week, would love to send out more!). And if you are Dorset based, a reminder that I am doing a demo/talk at The Kitchen Table in Shaftesbury, on the evening of 26th February. You can find all the details here.

Today’s recipe is another gratin-type thing, but I make no apologies as we are still very much in the season of Cooked Cheese weather. It is also the laziest of lazy dinners when you really don’t want to cook anything remotely elaborate. I had planned on bechamel. But as is so often the case at the moment, by the time I got to thinking about dinner time in practical terms rather than the ongoing fantasy around food which usual fills my head, I was too tired to face making it. I don’t know why, it takes no time at all, but there we are. Supervising the making of bechamel would have been just as bad as I would still have had to stand there, exhausting in itself, and would not endear myself to my son (“you aren’t stirring thoroughly enough! I can see the lumps forming! Oh, get out of the way!”) Yes, I am a monster. But either that or having to push through a sieve as I cannot bear lumps in something that is supposed to be smooth.

So cheat’s version it was. And so the conversation which some of you may already have seen on Instagram, apologies if so.

“What’s for dinner?”

“A kind of cheat’s cauliflower cheese. With extra vegetables. But very cheesy and creamy.”

“So what makes it cheesy and creamy?”

“That would be all the cheese and cream.”

The amount of cheese in this not for the faint hearted, but I do think the sweet, acidic pop of the cherry tomatoes I added do balance it out very nicely.

You can add all kinds of vegetables to this. If they take longer than zero minutes (for those of you who are new, zero minutes means bringing your cooker up to pressure and immediately removing it from the heat so it starts dropping pressure straight away), you can cook them first, then add the others. I was going to add potatoes first, but again, couldn’t be bothered so just stuck to zero minute vegetables and served with bread.

The recipe includes garlic powder and mustard powder.. I think garlic powder is one of the most underrated of ingredients (there is a kind of snobbery attached to it), but I think it is a wonderful thing to use. It cropped up such a lot in one chapter of Everyday Pressure Cooking it was flagged by the copy editor as possible cause for concern. It isn’t just the flavour/aroma, which is wonderfully pungent, creamy and smoky - it’s that just like mustard powder, it works like flour in that it can help thicken. So you can substitute fresh garlic if you like in this recipe - or use both. But only the garlic powder will thicken. One other thing about garlic powder - it does attract moisture so will harden quite quickly once a packet is open. To prevent this, adding a little rice to your jar will help. So apparently will adding a little packet of the food grade silica - I have never done this, but I’m sure it is the case. If not doing either of these things, I would advise leaving in a packet rather than decanting to a jar. The reason for this is that if it does go solid, it can be very hard to remove from any sort of jar - I have had to get very stabby with a sharp ended kitchen knife to break it up, just to get it out. If your garlic powder does go solid and you are able to get at it, you can either blitz it back to a powder in a spice grinder or dissolve whatever you need in some boiling water. And just quickly about mustard - You can also use mustard condiment in place of mustard powder - in this case, both will help thicken the sauce. But I prefer Dijon to English (slightly less sharp), which is milder than English mustard powder, which is why I have used a bit more of it.

Cauliflowers are cheap and plentiful at the moment, as is broccoli, but I should remind you that both are available frozen too, which cuts down prep time. I was for a very long time very sceptical about this, but was converted last year by Rosie Sykes. You can read how, here.

And you can find a trio of other cauliflower recipes, including a bechamel based cauliflower cheese here:

Cheat’s Cauliflower Cheese

1 tbsp olive oil

100g smoked bacon (optional, included to appease meat crazy son)

15g butter (if not using the bacon)

2 leeks, cut into rounds

Any herbs you like - I used 1 tsp dried oregano and some tarragon salt

1 small cauliflower, cut into small florets, include any OK looking leaves/stems

1 head broccoli, broken into small florets, stem trimmed and sliced

12-16 cherry tomatoes

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp mustard powder (or 2 tsp mustard)

100ml double cream

50g cream cheese

250g hard cheese (mature cheddars, gruyere, gouda, Ogelshield….whatever you have)