Leeks in Comté Cheese Sauce
(One of over 100 delicious vegetarian recipes
on the Be the Woman... Inner Circle)

On days like this of wet wind, blurred monotone reality and tingling fingers comfort food is just what's needed to bring the colour back to our cheeks and warm up our souls. Somehow cheese sauce always seems to feature in such dishes, whether it's cauliflower cheese (steam the cauliflower and add the cheese sauce), macaroni cheese (stir cooked macaroni into cheese sauce and bake in the oven) or, my favourite of all, leeks in Comté cheese sauce.

However, it's actually not as simple to get it as right as the others which is what lifts it out of the nursery and firmly into the realm of subtle adult luxury.

The ingredients here are absolutely key to making this a sophisticated dish. Choose what Grannie used to call "mousetrap cheese" and you're pretty much going to get a mundane boring result. Choose Comte, or a traditional English farmhouse cheddar cheese and you're going to elevate your guests to grown-up pleasure.

Good full-fat farm milk and butter are going to give this that smooth, rich texture reminiscent of melted chocolate.

Which leaves the leeks. If your goal is to use up the leeks in your veg basket, you're better off making them into a delicious classic,of leek and potato soup. But if you want to honour this noble vegetable in all it's white splendour with that blush of eau-de-nil then you need to have excellent leeks, fat and mature or young and sprightly, it doesn't matter. Just old and tired is a total no-no.

Here's what you do:

Today, we used about 200g of grated Comté to go with 6 fat bulbous leeks, and somewhere around a pint (1.5 - 2 cups there or thereabouts - look this isn't an exact science, it's an art!)

Top and tail the leeks and remove the tough outer leaves. Wash the leeks carefully; for some reason they often have lots of earth in between the layers which can be flushed out with the tap.

Place them snugly in a shallow oven proof dish and half submerge them in milk. Put the dish in the oven gas mark 4 for up to 40 minutes, depending on the thickness of the leeks, until the leeks are soft and almost translucent. Half way through check them and turn them over so they cook evenly all the way through.

When the leeks are done, very carefully remove the leeks to the side and pour the milk, with all its leeky flavour, into a saucepan and keep it just below simmering.

This is a good time to grate the Comté of your choice. The finer you grate it the easier it will be to make your sauce.

Now make the white sauce.

In a heavy bottomed saucepan melt a large knob of butter. Next add a spoonful of plain flour and stir to mix the butter and flour together. This is technically called a "roux" which is the French for rust. As the flour cooks the roux turns a lovely rich rusty colour. Don't go on until you know the flour's cooked - if you do you run the risk of having a rather unpalatable flour aftertaste to the finished dish.

Next add a small ladleful of the hot leeky milk and stir. Don't stop stirring from now until it's cooked. First make sure that there are no lumps. Yes, you can retrieve white sauce (also called Bechamel) by sieving it and starting again but it's way more hassle than just getting it right in the first place.

Once the first ladle of milk is absorbed, add the next - you haven't forgotten to keep stirring have you? - and then the next, and so on. It may take you up to 20 minutes, depending on how hot you have the milk, the white sauce pan, and your stirring skills. .

When the sauce is the right consistency, that of runny melted chocolate, add the grated cheese of your choice. Mix it in and let it melt into the sauce evenly. Add salt and ground white pepper cautiously.

Put the leeks back in the oven proof dish and pour over the white sauce. Put in a warm oven, gas mark 6 or 7, to warm through again.

Serve with lovely rich colour vegetables, such as red chard and grilled tomatoes, to bring out the lush simplicity of the white leeks in their velvety opulence.

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