In yet another “are you serious??” recipe, we are going to make a fantastic dish with something as lowly regarded as a humble leek. And, once again, I have to say that I’m not kidding!

You will need:

• Some leeks.
• Onions.
• Cream.
• Eggs.
• Salt.
• Pepper.
• Nutmeg.
• Butter.

You can also include other vegetables in the cake (I’ll get to that later), in this case I added some carrots too. Other vegetables that work well are asparagus or zucchini.

Start by chopping up the onion well, then throw it in a deep pan or pot with a nugget of butter or a bit of olive oil over a slow fire.

While that gets going, chop up the leeks and wash them thoroughly, making sure there is no soil/dirt left anywhere.

Add the leeks to the pot, and fry on low/medium, until the leeks are soft. After the initial frying, feel free to add a bit of water (half a glass or less) if they seem not to be juicy enough or are frying too fast (i.e., getting a little too burnt).

Once they are nice and soft, it’ll look a bit like this:

What you want to do now is to put them in a pot with the cream, the eggs (for those two leeks, which were a bit under a pound each, I used four eggs), salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and mix thoroughly with a food processor or similar implement.

If you feel that the mix is a bit too liquid, you can add a spoonfull or two of flour (I did add one in this case, for example). Also, unlike some other leek dishes like, say, vichyssoise, you don’t have to turn the mix into a fine grade mush with no fibers inside, so don’t worry about that too much, it’ll be fine after we bake it. You can see the loaf pan where we’re going to make the cake and how I’ve greased it with margarine.

Now, to cook it. Oven at 180°C and put a tray inside full of water. Once the over and the water are hot, put the loaf pan inside, and cook for 40-60 minutes. Keep an eye on the oven and add more water if it evaporates too much. The cake will raise near the end and will have a nice toasty colour.

Let it cool and set before serving. It’s best served cold or lukewarm, definitely not piping hot right after baking. Good things are worth waiting for!

Now, as I said before, you can add more vegetables if you want. I added carrots and mixed them in after slicing them, but another popular way of doing this (specially if you make the cake a lot “taller” with a narrower loaf pan) is to make layers. Pour some of the mix we have prepared in the loaf pan, put a layer of carrots or asparagus or whatever, add some more mix, put another layer of vegetables, and so on, with a final layer of cake mix.

You can do a similar cake with fish, maybe I’ll put that one up soon. Enjoy the food!