Braised green veg with cheese

Ok, not the most inspired name for a dish but it's what it is.
I had leeks to use up and on inspection of the fridge for inspiration also celery and half a lettuce.
Here's how it goes:

Green Veg & Cheese
1oz butter
Black Pepper
2 Leeks
3ish sticks celery
0.33 - 0.5 lettuce (mine was Iceberg)
0.25 pint veg stock
Grated cheese (I used my cave aged cheddar)

Preheat the oven to gas 5.
Melt butter in pan over a low heat.
Slice leeks and gently saute in the butter, covering the pan. Add a good grinding of black pepper.
Slice celery into 2ish cm pieces - whatever size you fancy as a bite size basically. Reserve the leafy tops. Add to the pan and gently fry both together for approx 10 mins replacing lid on pan.
Boil kettle for stock. Whilst it's coming to the boil chop the lettuce loosely into 1-2cm slices then roughly across a couple of times - again to a size you fancy. Add these to the pan and stir well. Cover and cook gently for a further 5 minutes - keep an eye or the lettuce can get soggy.
Empty pan into a ceramic oven dish and level out. Pour over stock so barely coming to tops of veg - depending on the size of the leeks / amount of celery / size of your dish you may need slightly more or less then the quarter pint I used.


Scatter grated cheese over the top mixed with the chopped celery tops. Grind a little more black pepper over if liked.

Bake in the oven 10-15 mins until cheese melted and just turning golden.








Serve in a wide bowl with both a fork and a spoon for all those lovely juices.








This was tasty and good and gave me plenty for a couple of meals at least. You can adjust the cooking time - saute for less if you'd like the veg a bit crunchier. (As I chopped as I went this was what the loose timings were based on.) Use what cheese you like best and feel free to omit the lettuce or use a different variety; although I do think a crispy one will work best here.
Also feel free to suggest a better name for the dish if you can come up with some! :-)
PS - apologies for the spacing and generally awful formatting of this post - it doesn't seem to like multiple pics and the preview bears little relation to the post once I save it. Grrr...