Chorizo, bean & vegetable cheese crumble & potoato dauphinoise in the pan

Day off. Very glad. Would normally spend all my free time cooking/baking or mooching around charity shops, fairs & markets to search for collectables. Hence - delectablecollectable. My two main passions in life.

I love a day when I'm really in the mood to cook, and today is one of those days. So, a quick peek into the fridge and cupboards (to see what I already have) swiftly makes up my mind that I will cook a vegetable crumble of some kind and potato dauphinoise in the pan. Neither of which I have really done before but of course with the help of the internet, and my growing pile of cooking books, I have an idea of where to start. To be honest, most things I cook, I just make up as I go along - and then if they're a success, I write them into my recipe book. Well, the 'notes' section on FB will allow me to do that easier and also add photos so that the balance of 'delectable' and 'collectable' of this site if more even.....

I cut an onion in half, grate about 150g of cheese and get out the butter as these ingredients are included in both recipes. Yes, only 150g of cheese for both dishes and I will usually use half margarine, half butter as I tend to try and make them slightly healthier. One sauce pan on, one frying pan on, tiny cubes of onion fry in both, the ones for the dauphinoise in butter, and for the veg crumble in olive oil. I did cook these simultaneously, creating a huge mess in the kitchen and a massive pile of washing up – but I’ve always thought ‘unless you use all the rings on the hob – is it really proper cooking?’

I add slices of chorizo to the onion and add cubed pieces of all the veg I have in my fridge – green beans, spring onions, red onion, a M&S bean salad, tomatoes – tinned and cherry and half a tin of sweetcorn. Whilst that is frying the pan, I add milk and cream to the other onions in the sauce pan and as it’s boiling slice two large baked potatoes into slices about 3mm thick (no larger.) The potatoes then cook in the milk for c. 8 mins. It smells lovely! (Beware of milk boiling over.)

So – potatoes are cooking and veg is cooked. I add one tin of chopped tomatoes to the mixture in the frying pan, season and add torn pieces of my home-grown basil. This then gets transferred into a glass oval dish whilst I make the crumble mixture.

I soften 100g butter/marg (1:3 marg: butter) and add 175g of flour. This is a combination of wholemeal spelt flour, 100g, and Doves Farm wheat-free white flour blend, 75g. The mixture is then rubbed into a crumble mixture and I add sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, grated cheese and seasoning. Pour this evenly over the veg mixture in the glass bowl and press down firmly.
Crumble = done!

The potatoes have now cooked in the buttery, oniony milk and are now ready to be arranged into the frying pan. (I use the same frying pan, unwashed, as it has all the lovely flavours in it still from the chorizo and veg mixture frying in there previously). I layer the potatoes carefully into the frying pan and pour over the milk/cream sauce. Sprinkling over the last of the grated cheese – only c. 50g, I also season this and leave both dishes ready to cook tonight. The crumble will need about ½ hour in the oven until golden and the potato dauphinoise only about 2-3 mins under a hot grill to melt the cheese and slightly heat up and brown.

Healthy, yummy, wheat-free dinner = done!