Alien Cauliflower
- Adventures in Chopping, Dinner, Leftovers, Vegan MoFo
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30 Oct 2011
I am convinced. Aliens walk amongst us.
I mean, have you SEEN this thing?
Romanesco Cauliflower
It’s the Christmas Tree Broccoli!
I first encountered this wonder if the form of a locally grown version while dining at the Local Chop & Grill House. It was delicious, and I’d never seen or eaten it before. I promptly forgot the name of the veggie, until I saw it today at the Friendly City Food Co-Op (and, it’s locally grown!). (BTW, juicing is expensive!! I’m going through produce like crazy, and that’s with only drinking 16 oz of juice per day!).
I just had to pick one up… not to juice, but to eat!
This thing was a blast to chop up. I tried so hard to maintain the cute little Christmas trees! It turns out, this thing isn’t broccoli. (Well, some countries call it broccoli, and there are cauliflower-broccoli hybrids out there that are similar, but this wackadoodle is a species of its own. In the US, we typically call it Romanesco Cauliflower. It chops up similarly to cauliflower, but it tastes more like broccoli.
Chopping the Romanesco Cauliflower
Now, personally, I’m not a huge broccoli fan (though I do eat it once a week or so), and I really don’t like cauliflower (even though I keep buying it anyway and then either tossing it because it goes bad before I convince myself to eat it, or I end up not liking whatever recipe I use it in). Is it just me, cauliflower-dislikers, or does it just look like it has so much potential?
But this Romanesco Cauliflower – it tastes more like a mild broccoli, and it’s really, really good! (It’s also gorgeous and funny looking and quite amusing to eat Christmas Trees).
The internet told me that this delicious little weirdo was best prepared either steamed or briefly boiled. One site suggested 2 minutes in boiling water, followed by a brief stir fry in a seasoned oil mix. I went that route, but tossed it in a quickie vegan garlic cream sauce instead (1/4 cup soy milk, 2 Tbsp nooch, a few cloves of garlic, a Tbsp or so of Earth Balance, and 1/2 tsp of basil).
Christmas Trees!
I had a bag of Shirataki tofu noodles in the fridge that needed to be eaten…
Shirataki Noodles
… so I served the Christmas Trees atop those, with some leftover Pumpkin Chickpea Fritters on the side.
Pumpkin Chickpea Fritters and Romanesco Cauliflower in Vegan Garlic Sauce with Shirataki Noodles
Wonderful dinner! Fantastic vegetable! I hope it sticks around so I can enjoy the Romanesco Cauliflower a few times before it goes out of season.
Posted: October 30, 2011 at 8:06 am
Dinner is served!
{Tags: garlic, romanesco cauliflower}
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Promises, Promises
- Adventures in Chopping, Dinner, Sandwiches & Panini, Vegan MoFo
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18 Oct 2011
It’s Vegan MoFo Week 3!
Yes, I know. You missed me yesterday. I’m back this evening for your foodie enjoyment, and a little birdie told me there’s a morning edition on its way, too.
First up: pesto veggie sandwiches! Oh. You mean, you’ve seen those before here? Or here? Hey – I promised I’d try to make 20 posts about food in the month of October. I never promised it’d be different food every day!
What can I say? I eat a lot of pesto veggie sandwiches. To make this instance a tiny bit more palatable, I will show you one of my magic kitchen weapons. This little beast makes chopping veggies super easy:
Pampered Chef Food Chopper
It’s the Pampered Chef Food Chopper. I couldn’t really tell you if other choppers work as well. I’ve used this one for years and it still looks and works like the day I bought it. The thing can take a beating (I’m a clutz) – it just keeps chopping away.
Now, I didn’t use it to chop these leeks…
Chopped Leeks
… but I did use it on the baby bellas (got a sweet deal on organics!) and the red peppers:
Leeks, Baby Bellas, and Red Peppers
Sometimes I use onions instead of leeks. It just depends what’s in my fridge. These leeks were on their last legs, for sure. This mix is made of 1 carton of baby bella mushrooms (16 oz), 1 large sweet red pepper, 3 leeks, and 3 cloves of garlic. Saute and salt to taste… voila!
Pesto Veggie Sandwich and Green Bean Fries
With my buddies the Green Bean Fries on the side (baked, not fried… 18 mins at 400F… salt and pepper… nom).
Posted: October 18, 2011 at 9:15 pm
{Tags: baby bella, green beans, leeks, mushroom, pesto, red pepper, sandwiches}
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Vacu Vin Pineapple Slicer
- Adventures in Chopping, Product Reviews
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09 Apr 2011
OK. So I’m a bit like Gollum. I’m pretty good at deadlocking onto shiny preciouses and proceeding with precision focus until the precious is mine. (It’s a blessing and a curse). I do have an affinity for gadgets, but I can usually sniff out the gimmicky ones and avoid them.
Enter: the Vacu Vin Pineapple Easy Slicer. Between it and its plastic siblings, this little gadget has nearly a gazillion positive reviews. Yet, my “gimmicky” radar was going off like Spidey Sense.
Aside from a vacation in Honolulu, I’ve never had fresh pineapple. It’s my favorite fruit, but being the clutz that I am, I deemed it much too dangerous to attempt chopping a pineapple myself. With visions of warm sea breezes and sweet, sweet pineapple nectar of the gods dancing in my head, I rolled the dice on this gadget. I went with the stainless steel version, hoping for some durability if in fact it worked. (Oh, who am I kidding? I just like how stainless stuff looks).
I ordered the slicer on Amazon, and then bought a pineapple in anticipation. An observation on pineapples: they are an angry fruit! Wow! I couldn’t figure out how to pick the thing up and carry it without drawing blood! I eventually wrapped my hands in my hoodie sleeves to pick the darn thing up.
Several reviews of the slicer mentioned that if the pineapple is too large, fruit will be left on the inside – so I tried to get one of the smaller pineapples of the bunch. I’ve since learned that this “medium” sized slicer is good for pineapples in the 3-5 pound range.
I took the pineapple slicer for a test drive this morning.
Vacu Vin Pineapple Slicer, and a Pineapple
The slicer did not come with instructions (gah!!) but thankfully the Amazon product page had a video demonstration, so I knew in a roundabout way what to do.
First, slice off the top of the pineapple.
Cut the top off the pineapple
Then, center the slicer on top of the pineapple and screw it in, clockwise. The teeth on the bottom of the slicer cut into the fruit with no problems.
Center the slicer on top of the pineapple and screw in
Continue to turn the slicer handle clockwise until it reaches the bottom of the pineapple. The only tricky part here is holding the pineapple in place, because – like I said – it’s an angry fruit! I ended up putting an oven mitt on my left hand while turning the slicer with my right, to prevent the pineapple skin from tearing my hand up. It was much easier to turn the slicer than I’d expected. I didn’t really have to use any force at all.
Twist the slicer into the pineapple until it hits bottom
Once you’ve hit bottom, pull the fruit out of the shell of the pineapple. It helped to twist it a bit while I pulled.
Pull the fruit out of the pineapple shell
Tada! A sliced and cored pineapple! I can see where a larger pineapple would leave more fruit in the shell.
Tada! A sliced and cored pineapple
Press the buttons on the side of the slicer handle to remove the handle, then slide the round pineapple slices off of the slicer. Serve as rings or cut into wedges. Yum!
Round pineapple slices
The way this slicer works, most of the juice is retained inside the pineapple shell. I poured the juice into a glass and got about 4 oz. from it. You could also use the remaining pineapple shell as a fruit bowl – nice party trick!
This little gadget, in my opinion, is genius. It’s brilliantly easy to use, and there’s very little risk of me losing any digits this way. If you’ve got a Bed Bath & Beyond store locally, the plastic version of this tool is on clearance for $6 (at least around the Chicago area), and it’s also available on Amazon ($8-ish for the plastic one, $16-ish for the stainless one).
Bravo! Fresh pineapple for everyone!
Posted: April 9, 2011 at 11:53 am
{Tags: pineapple}
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My New Friend, Spaghetti Squash
- Adventures in Chopping, Dinner, Vegan & Vegetarian
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09 Oct 2010
Make new friends, but keep the old…
I made friends with butternut squash this past winter, early into my “try new foods” experiment. This week, I made friends with a dear relative of the butternut squash – the spaghetti squash. And what a perfect name! This squash makes spaghetti! For real!
It makes a great substitute for traditional pasta noodles, and I plan to try it in every noodle dish I’ve ever had! Last night, though, I did a double-dip into the new foods arena: I roasted a spaghetti squash, and topped it with a sauteed mushroom sauce. Pretty brave, methinks. I’ve been terrified of mushrooms pretty much my entire life. Ironically, I think that they taste good – but I still have to avoid thinking about what I’m eating in order to tolerate them.
I got this recipe from Emily at The Front Burner – Spaghetti Squash and Vegan Mushroom Cream Sauce
Now, I’m certain this recipe would work just as well as a traditional non-vegan cream sauce. (In fact, I had to make mine an almost-vegan cream sauce, because the local grocery store didn’t have non-dairy creamer and I didn’t feel like making the 30 minute trek out to Whole Foods, so I had to get the dairy kind – but I did use soy milk as my sauce base).
Here’s what my dinner looked like (you can find many more photos of the process at the original link):
It was delish!I think what “made” the dish was the garlic and olive oil rub that I did on the spaghetti squash before roasting it. I’ve heard that butter and cinnamon works well too, for a more dessert-style side dish (thanks, Athir!) There really isn’t much to it other than, cut the squash in half, scoop out the guts, rub with seasonings, and roast for an hour or so at 375F. When it’s nearly done, prep your sauce, and voila.
The spaghetti squash is a little crunchier than pasta, but not much. It’s also a little bit sweet (so I can see where it would make a great dessert side). It tasted great with garlic!
I plan to try a marinara/cream sauce mix this evening with the leftovers
Posted: October 9, 2010 at 3:11 pm
{Tags: mushroom, roasting, spaghetti squash}
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Polenta Casserole with Seitan
- Adventures in Chopping, Recipes, Vegan & Vegetarian
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22 Mar 2010
It was an adventurous day today! First, I braved the mud at Messenger Woods to get a nice walk in. Then, I took a few bold new steps at Whole Foods, buying bulk dried beans for the first time, along with some exotic-to-me ingredients like sea vegetables for my upcoming kitchen adventures. I’m on spring break this week, so I plan to do a lot of cooking! I’m not sure where I’ll store all of the leftovers, but I’ll figure it out.
Tonight, I made my first vegan recipe out of Alicia Silverstone’s book, The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet
: Polenta Casserole with Seitan. It contained a few of those adventurous ingredients, so for those new to them, I’ll explain:
- Seitan – “wheat meat” – a protein-rich food made from wheat gluten that resembles the texture and taste of meat
- Tamari – a soy sauce made from soybeans, water, and sea salt, usually wheat-free
- Umeboshi vinegar (or ume vinegar) – technically not a vinegar, but a fruity, salty, sour product made from Japanese umeboshi plums
- Tahini – nut butter made from sesame seeds
OK, that covers all of the ingredients that I hadn’t heard of prior to reading this book! I was able to find them all at Whole Foods Market.
Step 1: seitan, asparagus, and corn.
Next, I employed my new kitchen laptop to look up how to chop parsley. I’ve never used fresh herbs before, and wow – fresh parsley smells amazing! I also felt like a freakin’ chef chop-chop-chopping by the time I was done with the parsley. Such a pro I am. (LOL!)
Before:
After:
I over-estimated how many parsley stems I’d need to end up with 1/4 cup of fresh chopped leaves, so hopefully I can think of something to do with my leftover chopped parsley soon. For those new to chopping parsley, you pretty much hold the knife as usual in one hand, then place your other hand on top to guide the knife as sort of a rocker back and forth over the parsley leaves.
Next up – the cornmeal mixture got spread on top of the seitan mixture, with some tamari sprinkled on top:
After baking, I did not read the instructions closely enough. They said to let the casserole sit for 15 minutes before cutting it into squares. I did not wait, and my casserole was mushy (though I also didn’t use as much cauliflower as the recipe called for, so that might have contributed to my mush-factor).Done:
I got 9 servings out of this recipe, though I used a 9×13″ pan instead of the recommended 8×8″ pan (couldn’t find my 8×8!) The original recipe notes 6 servings.And here’s what dinner looked like! I served the casserole with a side of spring greens with organic caesar dressing:
The meal turned out delicious. I like seitan – if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was meat (minus the cholesterol and saturated fat and other bad-ness that comes along with animal based meat). I have happily survived my first vegan meal![recipe-show recipe=polenta-seitan]
Posted: March 22, 2010 at 10:13 pm
{Tags: cauliflower, chopping, corn, peas, seitan, vegan}
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Stealth Ninja Vegetable Experiment: Prep
- Adventures in Chopping, Stealth Ninja Vegetables
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29 Jan 2010
*queue Mission Impossible music*
Actually, I think this mission is quite possible! I am embarking upon what I call the Stealth Ninja Vegetable Experiment. You are about to bear witness to Phase 1: Prep.
It all started when my sister in law Amanda suggested that I check out this book: Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food
by Jessica Seinfeld (yes, Jerry’s wife). Since I was already sold on the possibility of hiding veggies in my smoothies, I thought this book might hold some promise (though I’d be attempting to deceive myself, not kids). I picked it up at my local library (Homer Township Library ftw!) and decided to give it a test-drive.
The basic premise of the book is that you puree a variety of vegetables and store them in 1/2 cup portions in little ziplock baggies, then sneak them into recipes as needed. Sounds good to me!
Posted: January 29, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Continue reading this post
{Tags: beet, broccoli, butternut squash, cauliflower, chopping, peapod, puree, roasting, steaming, sweet potato, zucchini}
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Flatlander Chili
- Adventures in Chopping, Recipes
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17 Jan 2010
Chili is a big hit amongst my family and friends. My dad was the chili master. He used to joke that he would take his chili recipe to the grave… well, we thought he was joking, but doggone it, he wasn’t! A few of us will forever shake our fists at the sky when remembering Bob’s chili.
There’s no way I could replicate my dad’s chili, but I decided to try to find a recipe that at least reminds me of his chili and pays a little homage to the chili tradition he left behind. His recipe was a little sweet, a little spicy, and very flavorful. I came across a recipe on AllRecipes.com and modified it a bit. The result: a delicious chili that is pretty darn close to what my dad used to make. Read on for my secrets!
Posted: January 17, 2010 at 5:53 pm
{Tags: chili, chopping, Recipes}
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Adventures in Chopping
- Adventures in Chopping
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13 Jan 2010
Tonight I bring you the first in a series called, “Adventures in Chopping.” Sure, wielding a big, sharp knife may be child’s play to most of you, but to me? It’s confusing, intriguing, and simultaneously terrifying.
You see, I’m clumsy. ’nuff said.
At any rate, I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow, and I know I will not be waking up early enough to feed myself properly. Since I now have a fridge full of produce (thanks to Peapod), I thought I’d better get chopping (literally and figuratively). I decided to make tomorrow’s breakfast tonight, so I can just grab it and go as I sleepwalk out the door in the morning.
The adventure started like this:
Yes, I had to Google how to chop a bell pepper. I also had to Google how to chop an onion. Now you hush with the laughing!
It took me a good half hour to chop up one red pepper and one onion, but there was no bloodshed – and that’s a primary goal, right?
Mission accomplished.
On a side note, I have to share tonight’s dinner. I wouldn’t normally be so ga-ga over a sandwich, but this was the most delicious lunch meat I’ve ever had in my life… no joke. I will have to review it properly at some point. It was deli sliced herb turkey breast made by Applegate Farms – the organic meat company that touts, “There is no mystery to our meat!” The product description: “Our tender juicy turkey breast meat is lightly salted, coated with an earthy herb mix of parsley, rosemary and sage, then slowly roasted.”
I think that herb mix was more heavenly than earthy! Mighty tasty.
I wish I’d have gotten out the fine china for a sandwich of that caliber of deliciousness! (For the record: the sandwich was turkey breast with lettuce, mild cheddar cheese, and a little mayo on whole grain bread, with a side of vanilla yogurt with blueberries – all organic, of course!)
Posted: January 13, 2010 at 11:01 pm
{Tags: chopping, Organic, sandwiches}
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