Potato and Celery Root Gratin with Fontina Cheese

Well, I'm 0-2 in my recent recipe adventures.  I decided use the celery root I bought last week and make a Potato and Celery Root Gratin for dinner last night.  And at 8:00 pm when it was still not done, I gave up and we had canned refried beans (from Trader Joe's, so they were not too bad), heated, topped with cheese and sour cream and eaten with tortilla chips. 

So what went wrong with the gratin?  

I was using a recipe from another blog (which shall remain nameless) and they'd mentioned that their recipe was based on this recipe from Bon Appetit.  My mistake:  not checking the Bon Appetit recipe.  The blogger subbed 2 cups of milk (thickened with 2 tablespoons of roux) for the 2 cups of heavy cream called for in the original recipe.  Now it is possible to do that (I have a gratin recipe that only uses chicken broth as the liquid), but it greatly increases the cooking time since there is a heck of a lot more aqueous component to milk than there is with heavy cream and that small amount of roux cannot make up for that. 

And I really did know better since my favorite potato gratin uses heavy cream.  But that gets to the real issue...  the whole point of my New Year's resolution is to try new recipes.  Tweaking a  favorite recipe by simply adding a new component, is really not  the goal of this endeavor.  I want to discover new cooking methods and tricks and flavor combinations, so I've really been trying not to second-guess myself and to trust these recipes.  However, there obviously needs to be some middle ground.

Luckily, unlike the Kimchi, this dish was easily salvaged by additional time in the oven (nearly three hours total!) and the gratin was fine (although lacking in that dairy goodness I so adore)  reheated for a light dinner after a day spent lazing around on the couch, watching the snow fall.  

I did learn something from following this recipe -- the onions do not need to be cooked first  with this type of preparation. (Unlike with savory bread puddings where caramelizing the onions is vital if you don't want an overwhelming onion taste.  I guess the longer cooking time of the gratin is what makes the difference.)  Definitely something to remember because it really did cut down on the prep time to just layer sliced, raw onions between the potato and celery root layers.

Next time, I will make this as written in the original Bon Appetit recipe.  Because, while it was decent and rather low-fat as I made it this go-round, the dish would have been much tastier and  sumptuous with the inclusion of heavy cream.  Calories and cholesterol be damned!