Fennel and Potatoes in Cream

Adapted from Food52

Ingredients: 

1 fennel head
5 potatoes

black pepper
2tsp coarse salt
1 bay leaf
200g milk
200g cream

Chunk up the potatoes.

Cut off the fronds and other dark green bits of the fennel for another use. Quarter it, cut off the hard rooty bit, and pull it apart. Slice them into roughly the same dimensions as the potatoes.

Pour the rest of the ingredients into a pan, and warm up on low heat. Stir, then add the potatoes and the fennel.

If the milk does not submerge the vegetables completely, cover the pot. Keep an eye on it because milk has a tendency to bubble up and out of the pan and it is a terrible mess to clean up.

Cook for about twenty minutes, or until tender. Taste for salt.

At this point, you can drain the vegetables, reserving the milk liquid for another use. You can serve the vegetables at this point.

You can also portion them out onto gratin dishes and broil them until crispy. I recommend brushing a bit of oil over the top to help it crisp up faster.

Notes: 

You can swap out the fennel for leeks, if you like, or the potatoes for another root vegetable. Parsnip would probably work well.

For flavor, you can add a clove of garlic, garam masala, chilli flakes, amongst other things, to the milk. But if you use fennel, I actually suggest adding fennel seed instead, because I am afraid the garlic etc will over power the fennel.

Next time, I will probably not use cream. It is not necessary.

You can use the milk after that in a roux-based sauce. I plan to fry up some steak in butter, use that to make a roux and dump in the milk after that.