Leeks stuffed with blue cheese

Mmm, leeks

I really love Ottolenghi's stuffed onions, as I've posted about before, so I figured I might try doing something similar with leeks.  So, I did.

I cut the leeks so that I had the outer circles so that I could stuff them as long tubes, then - as the Ottolenghi recipe does with onion shells - boiled them in white wine and stock
for five minutes.

Leek tubes

Leek tube

Because I'm silly, I forgot that I'd need a larger pan than usual and heated up the stock and white wine in the pan I usually use for the onions.  I'm lazy about washing up so, rather than pour it into a large pan, I just put the leeks in the small pan anyway and turned them upside down after five minutes to do the other ends.  If you are less silly, you might just want to use a larger pan..

Less than sensible leek cooking method

While that was happening, I made some stuffing: finely chopped inside bits of the leeks, two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs, three small tomatoes finely chopped, about 300g of Danish Blue crumbled, 100g of Gruyere chopped, a teaspoon of mustard, a glug of olive oil, three cloves of garlic finely chopped, salt and black pepper.

Stuffing

Stuffing close up

Then, I stuffed the leeks and put them (cut side down) in the buttered pan, put enough of the stock and white wine over them to cover the base comfortably and baked for 25 minutes on 200 degrees C.

Stuffed and ready to go

Stuffed and ready to go

The result:  nice, but the leeks were a little tough, I suspect that they'd be nicer if boiled in stock for a little longer. There were a few leek skins that didn't quite fit in the oven dish so I did those as little parcels in another pan and, actually, these were much easier to get out of the dish than the long tubes were so I think that's another lesson for next time!  The stuffing was delicious, though, and I'm very tempted to use it again in other contexts - e.g. I might try stuffing onions with it next time..  or tomatoes.

Cooked leek tubes

Cooked leek parcels