Cauliflower Cheese!

On Monday Raju was driving me to Needs Supermarket and we were passing Hamilton Court. As we whizzed past (actually an exaggeration, because this road is so potholey if you tried to go fast you'd be airborne) I spied what appeared to be a display of WHITE cauliflowers. So obviously my thoughts turned to cauliflower cheese...

I knew I had milk and butter at home, but I'd need some flour to make the white sauce. Luckily we'd visited friends Rahul and Ahtushi on the weekend, so I knew fine ground, all purpose flour was called Maida. Put that in my basket. A Mum at school called Tania had told me Needs sold an Indian cheddar that, while you wouldn't put it on your cheeseboard, was good for grating on pasta. They were out of that, but I had some Scottish Cheddar at home. It was really too expensive to put in a cheese sauce, but this was the first time I'd seen a cauliflower I'd buy, so there was no way we'd not have cauliflower cheese!

Back at the veg stall, the cauliflowers thankfully did not disappoint. In fact all the veg here today looked better. The cucumbers were mid green instead of their usual rather sickly yellow green. The tomatoes were bright red. Some of them were round, and some were unblemished. I plumped for red and unblemished ones. If two out of three is good enough for Meat Loaf...
I finished my shopping with a couple of carrots and two handfuls of beans. Everything bar the cauliflower was weighed together, veg guy grabbed some coriander stems and few extra green things to balance the scales and asked for 70 rupees. 80 rupees is about a pound, and remember I'm being overcharged here because I'm a white western woman.

I get home to soak my veg in filtered water and Milton, which makes the kitchen smell like someone's been sterilizing baby bottles. Whilst I'm not partial to this smell, I'm grateful it's only vegetables I'm sterilizing... I discover the extra green things the veg guy used to balance out my basket weren't beans but chillis. About a dozen of them, which is probably 12 more than I would have chosen, particularly this early in our Indian adventure. I relegate them to the bin.

I set to the white sauce. Make a roux with butter and the Maida, good. Add in the milk, stirring to incorporate, good. Check no lumps, good. Check sauce thickening, not good. Frankly sauce looks like a saucepan of milk with a little melted butter in it. I simmer some more, and the texture changes not at all. After 15 minutes of simmering, the sauce is no thicker, there's just less of it because the milk is evaporating. Maida might be all purpose flour, but it's not fit for this purpose. Thankfully in the cupboard there's a jar of Alfredo sauce Rod had bought before we got here and not used.

I go to get my casserole dish, and remember it's in the crates, which are still somewhere in India that's not A151 Westend Heights. I do have a cheap cake tin I bought to make flapjacks. Now I'm glad I didn't buy the expensive one with the lovely non-stick coating. Into the cake tin I pour the steamed cauliflower florets and the jar of alfredo sauce. I sprinkle over "Real Bacon Bits" from a jar imported from America (while you can get bacon here it's not really bacon as we know it. Neither's "Real Bacon Bits", but actually they're closer). I don't have any breadcrumbs, so I crush cornflakes and scatter them on top.

After dinner I survey the plates. All four have been wiped clean. The cake tin is on the dinner table and all the extra saucy bits have been scraped out. Whilst it might have read like a "trailer trash" recipe it certainly went down well!