Leeks Braised in Three Cheese Cream and Tarragon

OK, I know you are all fed up with fish already. Within a week these pages have served up steamed salmon, mussels and Anna's gin-cured salmon, and gone ice fishing on top of that, though no fish came of it. But no worries. The salmon in the picture is there only because I had to use the fillet while it was still fresh. The real superstar here is the leek. Yummylicious!

The salmon is Norwegian again and steamed in the bamboo steamer, this time in a marinade of soy sauce and wasabi. I really love the sharpness of wasabi with warm, fatty fish. Beside it are a few slices of cucumber, and the rest of the plate belongs to the leek.

Until now a leek has been for me a vegetable that gets sliced into a soup or a stew among the others. In this dish there is nothing else. I halved one big leek of about half a kilo lengthwise and baked it in cream and chicken broth for an hour and a quarter, until it was soft all the way through and brown on top.

The credit for the recipe goes to Molly at Orangette, although she adapted hers from the book Fresh from the Farmers' Market. This is not the first time I have borrowed from her, as the nine-hour tomatoes in January came from the same blog. Orangette was voted the best overall food blog of 2005 in January, and its list of delicious-looking dishes seems to have no end. Molly made the dish for the Christmas table, from eight slender leeks, and seasoned it with fresh tarragon. I had one fat leek and dried tarragon, but I kept her amounts of cream and broth, half a cup of each, which explains the 120 ml measures in the recipe. Tarragon has a faint taste of aniseed to me, and Molly too wants only a hint of it in the dish, so half a teaspoon of the dried herb is plenty.

My own addition is three cheeses. A little emmental, gouda and cheddar is grated into the sauce. In Finland the easy way out is to buy Valio's three-cheese cooking cream, the same ten per cent cream I put into my penne alla vodka a couple of weeks ago. Mmm, cheesy.

I cut off the dark green tops and the roots and halved the leek lengthwise so that I could rinse it properly, since soil always collects between the layers. When the leeks had been in the oven for half an hour I turned the halves over, and then they stayed there for another 45 minutes. In that time they drank up most of the sauce, and the long baking took the raw onion bite out of the leek and left its sweetness. As the picture shows, mine went well past golden brown in places, but it did them no harm.

One leek makes a side dish for one or two, and the whole dish comes to 280 kcal. An hour and a quarter is a long time for a side dish. After the four-hour onions and the nine-hour tomatoes, though, that sort of thing no longer startles me. In the oven the leeks need nothing but the one turn, and the salmon steams in six minutes when they are nearly done.