Cauliflower Cheese: food of the gods ?

I have a brassica-phobic in my household.  He'll eat broccoli but hates cabbage, cauliflower and especially Brussels sprouts.   I serve all these up regularly despite this and he does show willing and eat them, but under sufferance and not with enjoyment. The exception to this dislike is Cauliflower Cheese.

Romanesco Cauliflower

I do add a few other ingredients when I make Cauliflower Cheese which means it's not quite just plain cauliflower served with a cheese sauce. It also means that it's not a vegetarian dish as I add bacon.

I use cauliflower, flour, butter, milk, water, cheese, bacon, leeks and a crushed bag of crisps (vital for a crispy topping!).  I once used a pink cauliflower and produced 'Barbie Pink Cauliflower Cheese' which delighted my daughter, and I have used an amazing fractal green Romanesco cauliflower  which always seems a bit of a shame as you cover the fractals with a Cheese sauce.  I also commonly add Broccoli to the Cauliflower to make Broccoli and Cauliflower cheese.

Pink Cauliflower

I have many other variations of what goes in and on the dish too, I have added frozen sweetcorn and peas, all sorts of cheeses, made it into a kind of savoury crumble with cheesy breadcrumbs sprinkled on top, and made it without the bacon, leeks or even a cauliflower.  I also usually try to use the Broccoli/Cauliflower stalks in the dish rather than throwing them in the compost bin.

Because it has other ingredients, the Cauliflower cheese I make is a one dish meal in one, you could serve it with other vegetables and it can just be a side dish itself, but for me it is usually the main attraction.

A few notes about the ingredients.  Firstly, the Flour.  I use Self Raising flour for making this cheese sauce.  Quite by accident I used Self Raising rather than plain flour once and discovered that it made the sauce seem so much thicker and creamier than using plain flour.  Secondly, the Crisps for the topping.  This is a tip from my childhood, I remember my mum using crisps on top of our cauliflower cheeses to make a crispy topping, but you can tweak the flavours around slightly and get a smoky bacon or oniony scented topping as an added extra by using cheese and onion or bacon crisps. Thirdly, the Bacon. I tend to use thick sliced unsmoked lean bacon from the butcher but it's up to you.

So, Cauliflower Cheese makes cauliflower the king, it's a great winter supper dish, and for us a real family favourite.  My daughter reckons that if the classical gods had lived in Wales and known about Cauliflower cheese then they would have preferred it to Ambrosia but I'm not sure about that..........