Further adventures in dealing with the veg box

 

I have mixed feelings about cauliflower, mostly negative. I don’t even like cauliflower cheese: for me the lumps of weirdly textured white stuff, strangely tasteless, yet still bitter, just ruins good cheese.  However, I have tried it roasted to within an inch of its life, until lightly charred, and the florets are pretty good (the stalks are still horrid, for some reason). So, I regarded the large one (roughly the size of my head) which arrived in our recent veg box with a somewhat jaded eye, especially in light of my recent not entirely successful attempts at making swede edible (see here).

The first thing to do with it was fairly easy – to make most dubious vegetables more edible, apply (lots of) heat and spice. Toss cauliflower with lemon juice, oil and paprika, then roast in a fairly hot oven (about 200 degrees fan) for about half an hour, until nicely charred. Lovely. I served this with merguez spiced chickpeas, yoghurt and flatbread. All wonderfully beige.

Roasted cauliflower, further excellent beige stuff in background

For my next cauliflower trick, I made cauliflower cheese cakes (despite my feelings about cauliflower cheese), from New Kitchen Basics, definitely one of the best cook books I have bought this year. I went for it mostly because you start by blitzing up the florets, and a large part of my issues with caulis is the texture. So – first, blitz or finely chop your florets (about 125g for six cakes, about right to serve two). The recipe says pea sized, but mine were a bit finer, see above feelings about texture. 

Blitzed cauliflower

Mix the blitzed bits with an egg, mustard, breadcrumbs and cheddar (ish – I used Black Bomber) cheese. Place the mixture into greased muffin tins and bake for fifteen minutes. I grated some parmesan on top as an extra, because more cheese is rarely a bad thing. 

Ready for the oven

They were…delicious, actually. Main flavours cheese and mustard, with a bitter cauliflower undertone to stop them being two sweet. So good I will actually in future choose to buy a cauliflower, in order to make this. A cauliflower conversion.

The final deliciousness, served with roast fennel and potatoes with pesto

And a close up, because why not?