Cauliflower

This is part of my A to Z Challenge for the month of April.

All Hail Cauliflower!

It is one of the magic ingredients when eating a plant based diet. I wasn’t always all in on cauliflower. I liked it better than broccoli but I believe cooked broccoli is poison designed by the fictional devil himself to torture humans. The husband didn’t ever want me to make cauliflower because it reminded him of brains.

Cauliflower (and the dreaded broccoli) is part of the cruciferous family of vegetables. They are nutritional powerhouses. Everyone should eat more. The problem is that group includes a lot of the vegetables that everyone thinks they hate.

I’m a cauliflower convert. This recipe from the website From My Bowl for a Buffalo Cauliflower and Chickpea Dump and Bake casserole was the turning point for the husband. You don’t even have to make this super spicy if you aren’t into that. We use Frank’s Red Hot Mild Wing Sauce and we are super wimpy spice people.

We evolved from that recipe because we liked the taste so much. Now we make cauliflower buffalo wings. There are a million recipes online but now I sort of do it by eye.

Cut 1 head of cauliflower into florets. Combine roughly 1 cup of dry ingredients (I use a combination of chickpea flour and nutritional yeast) and 1 cup of nondairy milk into a batter. You can make it runny if you want the cauliflower thinly battered or use less liquid to get a thicker batter. Dump the cauliflower into the bowl and stir to get it all covered.

Pour it out onto a parchment paper covered baking sheet. Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.

Take the cauliflower out and mix it in a bowl with whatever wing sauce/hot sauce you like. Pour it back on the sheet and bake for another 10 minutes.

I generally double this recipe and also roast a large sweet potato cut into cubes for the 30 minutes that the cauliflower is baking. Then I serve the cauliflower over the sweet potato pieces and top with extra wing sauce and vegan ranch dressing. It is so good that it has become our go-to Sunday night meal.

I’ve also used cauliflower as part of a faux-cream base for soups. We use cauliflower rice sometimes to switch up our veggie bowls from just regular rice.

It is amazing and versatile and you can eat so much of it for so very few calories. To hear more about that, come back tomorrow for letter D.