Broccoli and Gorgonzola pancakes

A couple of days ago I wrote about making polenta chips with Sage. Here's a photo of them served up with the dish I'm going to describe today: Broccoli and Gorgonzola pancakes.

The inspiration for this dish was the availability of another small batch of Purple Sprouting Broccoli spears from the garden.

These little spears are very delicate and could easily be overwhelmed unless treated with care, so I decided that they should be encased in some savoury pancakes. I made a batch of pancakes in the usual way - with flour, milk, egg and a pinch of salt.

I placed a generous slice of strongly-flavoured Gorgonzola cheese in the centre of each pancake and flanked it with a couple of Broccoli spears (which I had very briefly parboiled in advance).

I folded-in the ends of each pancake and then rolled it up and placed it seam-side down in an ovenproof dish.

I then made a Bechamel sauce, stirred in more Gorgonzola cheese and covered the pancakes with it. (If you don't like strong blue cheese, this dish is not for you!)

Then into the oven with it for about half an hour, to warm it through and brown the top.

The pancakes were served with those polenta chips, and lots of salads.



Lovely soft pancakes, oozing with creamy blue cheese. Heaven! It's a pity there wasn't more broccoli though. About twice as much would have been welcome.

Just below the Little Gem lettuce in my picture you can see some of the Celeriac and Beetroot remoulade I made.

I made this with grated raw Celeriac and Beetroot, with a couple of spoonfuls of ready-made mayonnaise stirred into it, with a drizzle of olive oil to loosen it slightly. Easy to do and well worth the effort, because it was incredibly tasty. The final element of the dish was a salad of sliced radishes with sesame oil and sesame seeds. I loved the strong nutty flavour of the sesame, but Jane wasn't so keen. Sesame oil is quite strong and I think I had put too much of it in for her liking!

As we were eating this meal we suddenly realised that without consciously planning it to be so, we had eaten three meatless dinners in succession. At the beginning of the year we had set out to try to have at least one meatless dinner every week, so it seems as if we have succeeded in this quite well!

Our decrease in meat consumption may be well-timed because I see that our much-loved local butcher's shop - The Linkway Butchers - has this week closed down. I believe this is because the proprietor is very ill (for which I offer my commiserations). I really do hope it will re-open at some stage, because their meat has shown us how bad supermarket meat is!