Inspired

Last Friday Lundulph and I went to our local cinema for the very first time. It's in the town hall court room and there's only one projector, which means there's an intermission half way through a movie. However, this means the bar is open and the audience can get a glass of wine or such.

As it turned out, it was open before the start of the film too. Lundulph took this opportunity to enhance his viewing with the red fruit based drink. I had to abstain as I'm on antibiotics at the moment, after having a wisdom tooth removed last week. Toothless old crone, that's me.

The main reason for going is that the movie in question was Julie & Julia. I wasn't familiar with Julia Child and I certainly wasn't aware of Julie Powell's blog. But it was about cooking and a cookery blog and although I couldn't imagine how you could make a full feature film from that, I wanted to see it.

Well, the movie was really good, I enjoyed it very much and I spent some time this week-end looking up various things and started reading the Julie/Julia project blog. So far the movie has stuck fairly close to the story. But as things have been milling around in my mind, I've been inspired and decided to put this inspiration to work today. (My previous two blog entries today are pure catching up, don't go thinking I've been busy all day long.)

I had some potatoes left over from last night's meal. That is I'd bought 1 kg and I think I'd used about 400 g of them. I also had some leftover double cream that I really hoped I wouldn't have to throw away. And I'd stopped by IKEA and picked up a lovely looking blue cheese.



Ingredients

600 g waxy potatoes
400 g / 230 g can of button mushrooms
an alarmingly generous amount of salted butter, coming up to about 100 g!
1 dl double cream
75 g blue cheese
salt (I forgot the pepper, but it should have been there.)

Method

1. Set the oven to pre-heat on gas mark 6 (200 degrees C), then butter an oven safe dish with a lid.


2. Wash the potatoes and cut in wedges, put in the dish, then place two thick slices of butter on top (probably around 50 g). Put the lid on and then into the oven for 25 - 30 minutes.


3. In the mean time, drain the mushrooms, then quarter if using whole ones.


4. Put another thick slice of butter in a large frying pan and heat up on medium, then add the mushrooms and fry until they get a bit of colour.


5. Once they are done, pour in the double cream, salt and the blue cheese. Stir in until the cheese has melted, then set aside.


6. Once the potatoes have baked for 25 - 30 minutes as per above, take them out and stir in the mushroom sauce, so that mushrooms and potatoes mix up well and the potatoes get coated with the cheese - cream sauce.


7. Then lid on and back into the oven for another 20 minutes.


8. After that, take the lid off, crank up the oven to gas mark 8 (230 degrees C) and let the dish get a nice golden colour for about 5 minutes.

I forgot the pepper sadly and should have been a bit more careful with the salt. More cream would also have been beneficial. I had this for lunch today and it was very yummy. I think it would be very nice with a pepper steak and some nice green, crispy lettuce. And in hindsight, I should have been a lot more restrained with the butter.