Green Mac N Cheese !

I mean who doesn’t love Mac N Cheese without the guilt ?  There’s not one person in our house that complains this is green or has veges in it.  The only complaint is whose serve was bigger and why isn’t there anymore !?

I’ve made this probably five or six times and saw it on Jamie Oliver’s Veg series and decided to get the book:

I'm always on the case for having at least one vegetarian meal a week, and this has lots of good ideas for mains and sides.

Green Mac N Cheese takes about 30 minutes to prepare and about 1 hour 10 minutes from first chop to on your table.    It's also one of those meals that can be a meal for 5 or a side for 8-10 serves.  Depends on what you feel like.

I of course have tweaked some of this over the number of times I've made it so feel free to do that yourself,  I've added cherry tomatoes in before the bake, I've put lots of cheese on top before, I've used broccoli instead of broccolini...  Jamie uses flaked almonds instead of panko breadcrumbs, you can use that or regular breadcrumbs... up to you.  

Ingredients

3 cloves garlic, sliced

1 large leek, sliced

200g broccolini, stalks chopped, florets reserved

40 g butter

Thyme - a couple of stalks of fresh or 1/2 tsp dried

2 tb plain flour

1 litre light milk (or whatever you have)

400g pasta of your choice (I use orecchiette)

150g vintage cheddar

30g parmesan cheese

30g spinach (can be baby or silverbeet or even frozen)

1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs 

Method:

Preheat over to 180 degrees c

Chop up your veges, reserve your florets

Put a little oil in the pan, add all veges apart from the florets in the pan and add butter and thyme.  I also put a pot with water to boil for the pasta later.

Let it cook for a while, you want the leek to caramelise.

Then, sprinkle over your flour and mix it in...

Then, add milk approx 150-200ml a time and stir, let it thicken then add another... 

How good does that look!? Smells amazing too!

by the 600ml mark it won't thicken much so just add the rest and let it come to a broil.

Put your pasta into your boiling water


Grate your cheeses - I cheated and put mine in the theromix...



Then add the cheese to your mixture, add your spinach and combine.

Remove from your pan, put into a blender and whizz.  You may have to do a few batches depending on the size of your blender.   My thermomix did the whole thing.

Combine your mixture with pasta and broccolini florets into and ovenproof dish

Then sprinkle the breadcrumbs on top and a little more grated parmesan.

Bake for about 35 minutes until it starts to form golden patches on top.

Enjoy!

Do you reckon you could give this a try?

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