A finger-licking dinner dish. No unicorn tears required.


Can you make a finger-licking dinner dish out of cauliflower or broccoli? Olga can and is sharing her secret recipe with all of us. 

Olga wrote this post in my "Write for Real: Blogging in English" course. I love it because it's a perfect combination of practical and personal: it's a real recipe told through the lens of Olga's sweet personality.

✽✽✽

"I thought you couldn’t even make a decent brew," my cousin said, sipping tea whilst helping herself to a second serving of my signature cauliflower cheese.

Actually, I CAN make a nice cup of tea as I had quite an extensive training in all sorts of tea leaves and milk- to-brew ratios when working for my English boss and much more but… There are just certain skills that one wouldn’t casually share. Otherwise you would all be calling me all the time to ask how many lemons to put into a lemon cake.

I do sometimes embrace my inner Jamie Oliver, though I am perfectly happy to keep everyone disillusioned about my cooking. I’d rather make a rabbit stifado once a month rather than provide everyone with lunch boxes and dinners every day.

Well, back to my favorite recipe of simple and humble cauliflower cheese that will keep every party guest happy. Don’t worry, you won’t need unicorn tears or moon dust unlike other cuisine recipes. What you will need is: 
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • A knob of butter
  • A spoon of flour
  • A glass of milk
  • A generous amount of broccoli/cauliflower
  • A sprinkle of salt and pepper
  • Any cheese (cheddar is the best though!)
  • Bread crumbs
  • And my secret ingredient - nutmeg
First, do the béchamel sauce (or simply said - whisk butter, flour and milk together with your salt, pepper and nutmeg). Put the veggies in the tray and grate that garlic; then pour over the béchamel sauce and add a layer of cheese and breadcrumbs. Leave it baking at around 180C, nicely bubbling away until golden. Finish it off with a lot of love, and you’re good to go!

As my cousin was munching her third serving she begged me for the recipe, which I am sharing with you today. You see? I CAN indeed make a nice brew and a finger-licking dinner dish. And now so can you!

✽✽✽

It does sound finger-licking good, doesn't it? Embrace your inner Jamie Oliver and give it a shot! 

Image credit: Photo by Louis Hansel - Restaurant Photographer on Unsplash

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to tame your IELTS pie charts

Image
IELTS line graphs are easy to tame - you just go chronologically, so the description doesn't get out of hand. Information in pie charts, however, can be hard to organize because there are different directions you can go in. In this post, I want to share two IELTS pie chart answers I wrote for the same task. The task is from Cambridge IELTS 11 . The introduction and the overview are the same. As you read, pay attention to the organization and try to decide which description works better. ✼✼✼ Introduction  The pie charts compare the percentage of British students of one English university who knew foreign languages in 2000 and 2010. Main Body Version 1 The percentage of students in three groups grew. Speakers of Spanish formed the largest share in both years, rising by 5% from 30% to 35%. The increase was the same in the “Another language” and “Two other languages” groups. In 2010, the former amounted to 20%, while the latter comprised 15%, making up the second and third largest prop
Read more

Top 8 mistakes Russian learners of English actually make

Image
Due to the nature of my job, every once in a while I stumble upon an article about N most common mistakes that learners of English make. I look at them and go, “Who makes these mistakes? Russians certainly don’t.” (For example, Russians don’t confuse your and you’re .) In this post, I want to talk about 8 common mistakes Russian learners actually make. These mistakes persist on different levels, but are not usually addressed in EFL course books. The list is based on my personal teaching experience. The order is random. 1. I with I often ask students “What did you do at the weekend?” and what I hear is “ I with my friends went to the cinema. ” The right way to say something like this is “ My friends and I went to the cinema ,” or “ I went to the cinema with my friends .” In English, the word order is “subject+verb” and prepositional phrases can’t go in the middle. 2. How to say When students don’t know how to say something, they ask me or murmur to themselves “ How t
Read more

My Fulbright application or a teachable moment on essay writing

Image
I did it one day before the deadline. I submitted my Fulbright application on 30 May 2014. Now, 14 months later, I am going to the USA as a proud Fulbrighter! The program I am participating in is called Foreign Language Teaching Assistant or FLTA for short. As a participant of this program I will be teaching Russian and studying at an American university for an academic year. When my students heard the news, they asked, “What did it take to get this grant?” I replied, “Well, there were several stages. First, I had to write a lot of text. Then, I … .” And one student said, “I am curious to read what you wrote.” I suppose many are, so I am going to let you in on one of my application essays. One of the essays I wrote is called “Objectives and motivations.” What I wrote is too long to upload here (1274 words, no less!), so I am only going to share my introduction and conclusion . Oh, and I see a teachable moment here, which I just can’t help using. Introduction "Albe
Read more

C2 Proficiency. Writing Task 2. Review (of a film I haven’t seen).

Image
I keep writing like crazy because I am preparing for the C2 Proficiency test (fka CPE). In my previous post, I shared my Writing Part 2 article . In this post, I want to share a review I wrote about a movie I haven't seen and give some insights into handling an unfortunate task. Task A film magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of films which are set in the future, but deal with themes relevant to today’s world, such as our relationship with technology or environmental problems. You decide to submit a review briefly describing such a film and explaining why its themes are relevant today. You should also consider how important it is for films set in the future to say something about contemporary society.   ( Cambridge English Proficiency 2 , Test 2, Question 4). This is a really unfortunate task for me because I watch very few movies, maybe 3 a year. But as I read it, I imagined myself sitting in the exam room not wanting to fail, so I had to come up with somethin
Read more