Potatoes with Bacon and Cheese Sauce

 All recipes in this blog are my own.

This is one of my favorite recipes :)
Please note that I never measure anything at all, so the amounts are not exact but should be pretty close.

What you need:

- 3 large potatoes
- 1 standard package of bacon
- a big head of broccoli
- butter (about 1/4 of a stick)
- flour (about 2 tbsp)
- salt 1/4 tsp (optional)
- pepper 1/4 tsp
- nutmeg 1/4 tsp (optional)
- 1 cup of milk
- mustard 1 tbsp
- 1 1/2 cups of grated cheese 

It takes me about 40 minutes to put this together, and I'll give you the sequence of actions. This feeds 4 people and it's well worth the time.

- Peel and wash the potatoes, and cut them in thick slices, each slice being a half to 3/4 inch thick.
- Boil the potatoes.
- While the potatoes are boiling, wash the broccoli, cut it up and boil it.
- Cut the bacon into thin pieces and fry it.
- Turn the oven on warm, just warm.

- When the potatoes are ready, drain them and put them in a large baking dish. Keep them warm in the oven.
- Drain the broccoli but keep the water you used to boil it.
- Add the broccoli to the potatoes in the oven.
- Drain the grease off the fried bacon. I keep the grease and freeze it to be used for popcorn making some other time.
- Add the bacon to the mix in the oven, dividing everything evenly across the baking dish.

OK now you just need to make a cheese sauce and that's it.

- Put the butter in a pan and melt it.
- Add the flour to make a roux
- Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and mustard. 
- Add milk and keep stirring. It should be pretty thick. 
- Add some of the water in which you boiled the broccoli, add a little at a time until you have a smooth looking sauce.
- Add the grated cheese, stir one more time and pour the sauce over the contents of the dish in the oven.
- If you want to be fancy, you can also put some grated cheese over the top of it all and put it under the broiler until brown.

Serve and enjoy.