Cheese sauce

Apologies for my non-posting this week. Now that the final exam is over I've had to catch up on the postgrad stuff I put off to concentrate on it. And then I've been having computer problems, and internet problems, and - you name it!

I do have lots of things to share with you, and I'll probably stick up a backdated post and schedule one or two to keep my readers (both of them!) going while I work on a pretty gnarly assignment over the coming fortnight. And another wee thing I'm working on...

For now though, I give you pumpkin and potato mash with cauliflower cheese and venison, pork & apple sausages, and sweet onions. I won't say caramelised as I was lazy and just slow fried them with a spoonful of sugar, but it worked out almost as good.

Now, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how to peel some potatoes and pumpkin and boil them in a pot, so I'll start with the tricky customer of cheese sauce, which many people waste a lot of money buying inferior ready-made versions of under the mistaken impression that it's hard to make. It isn't. All you have to do is....

Melt some butter in a saucepan (say, a wooden spoonful), then add flour to it a bit at a time until you make a fairly thick paste like this:

Ignore the onions, I just chopped those ready to go with the sausages. Once you've got your butter and flour paste, you add a little splash of milk at a time and stir it in. As it gets runnier you can add more milk in one go without it going lumpy.

People will tell you nonsense like, oh, saying you have to have JUST the right amount of this or that to make it perfect, but I think that's just people who can cook trying to make themselves sound more skilled than they really are by telling people who can't cook that they're doing something that requires fine care and long experience. In reality, cheese sauce is pretty fool-proof. The only thing you need to remember is to take it off the heat after you've melted the butter, don't put it back on until the cheese stage, and during the cheese stage don't stop stirring!

If it turns out too runny, just add more cheese and it'll thicken up. Too thick? Add more milk. Nae bother, bud.

So now you've got your milky-buttery-floury base, and you want to add some grated cheese. Cheddar works a treat - the more mature the fuller the flavour. But you can equally do it with red Leicester, double Gloucester, and in this case I'm using Lincolnshire Poacher, which is sort of like a cross between Cheddar and Parmesan.

Some people put black pepper in at this stage, but while black pepper is like crack to me (I put it in everything and can't get too much), cheese sauce is one of the few occasions where I prefer white pepper. It's up to you.

Just throw a handful of cheese in to start with, return it to a low heat and patiently stir it until the cheese has melted and blended in. Keep adding more cheese until it reaches the thickness you prefer, and then you can take it off the heat and leave it aside until you want to eat it. The whole operation takes around 10 minutes if you're organised, and you can make enough to feed a small regiment for peanuts. What's more, you can make up larger quantities and it'll keep in the fridge for about a week, ready for another meal. Try it, and you'll never go back to shop-bought again.

Incidentally the base for this sauce (butter, milk, flour) is known as a roux, and can be turned into lots of different sauces depending what you put in it next. One I often do is adding tomato purée, salt and parsley rather than cheese, for a sauce that makes a wonderful tuna and pasta bake - just sprinkle crushed crisps and grated cheese on top and you're laughing.

For this meal I baked the sausages (because my grill doesn't work) until they were nearly done, then put them in the pan with the onions so they could pick up each other's flavours:

 ...then mashed the potato and pumpkin together with a little milk and some salt and pepper, and served it all with those onions I mentioned and the rest of it, thus: