I found a recipe on the “Strands of my life” blog for Jamie Olivers’ 30 minute Cauliflower Macaroni Cheese and I decided to make a variation of it without the Macaroni. I didn’t try to do it in 30 minutes.
(Note: the recipe is lifted from his book, to which there is a link on the blog. Of course, you don’t have to buy the book to use the recipe, so the ethics of posting a recipe from a book might be a bit dodgy. On the other hand, the blog entry does act as an advertisement for the book.)
Anyway, I did as the recipe suggests and put the bacon into the dish that I was going to use and put the dish in the oven, then started the cauliflower cooking. I actually needed to cut the cauliflower a little smaller than the recipe suggests as I was only cooking a small amount of cauliflower so used a smaller pan.
I grated the cheese, mixed it with the crème fraîche and some garlic powder. As the recipe directs, I took the dish with the bacon from the oven and processed the bacon with the bread and some rosemary leaves. I had expected the bacon to be crunchy, bit it was still soft, but I pressed on. The recipe calls for a little olive oil, which I added and which serves to cause the topping to crisp up nicely.
At this stage the cauliflower was cooked and I strained it, keeping the liquor as directed. Then it was just a matter of putting it together. The cauliflower went into the dish that the bacon had been cooking in. There was a fair bit of juice from the bacon in the dish, then in went some of the liquor from cooking the cauliflower, then the cheese/crème fraîche mixture. The mixture was a little too liquid, though the recipe calls for it to be “loose”, so next time I will add a little of the liquor first, then more after I see what it looks like.
Finally I covered the top with the bacon, breadcrumb and oil topping and cooked it as directed by the recipe. It came out of the oven like this. It could have been a little crisper on top.
Here’s a picture of it on a plate. The mince was cooked the other day!
Me on the net 