Roast beef shaded by vegetable accompaniments: celeriac butter mash and cauliflower with bechamel, blue cheese and walnuts.

Fragrant celery-like flavour with a herbal nose comes from celeriac, the ugly vegetable at the back of the greengrocer’s shelf.

They were a dollar each so I picked two and made an excellent alternative to the usual potato mash.

No recipe really required. Peel, boil until soft, mash with lashings of butter, salt and pepper. 

I served the ugly vegetable alongside a slow-roasted slab of beef and a whole cauliflower lightly boiled and then drowned in bechamel over which I crumbled blue cheese and walnuts and baked, covered, for an hour in the same slow oven.