Category Archives: Recipes from my Kitchen

Creamy Cauliflower Queso

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Creamy cauliflower queso and chips in a couple of my hand-built bowls.

When I recently made the lovely cauliflower alfredo sauce from Cupcakes and Kale, my recipe gears started to spin.  While many of us have fallen hard for the endless possibilities of raw cashews, using cauliflower and beans to make a creamy spread opens up new doors (and less calories and fat).  With different spices and varying amounts of liquid, it’s a veritable fount of creamy sauce possibilities.

The idea that stuck was a cauliflower queso with a hit of cheesiness from nutritional yeast flakes, depth from white miso, and a kick from chili powder, hot sauce, and pickled jalapeno slices.  I wanted the sauce to stay mild enough, so that it could be layered with salsa, spicy chickpeas or black beans, and served over tortilla chips for a nacho platter.  I wanted it to have enough body and flavor to stand out on its own, but not too much to overwhelm with other spicier ingredients.  The texture isn’t the same as, say, one might find from a nacho cheese pump at the movie theatre or baseball stadium.  (That’s a good thing, right?)  It’s more similar to a bean dip in depth but with a whippy viscosity from the blended roasted cauliflower.

Using a Vitamix or other high-speed blender, this queso becomes surprisingly smooth and velvety.  It can be used on its own as a dip or layered over steamed broccoli.  Put a dollop on baked French fries and top with more hot sauce and jalapenos, or go the cheesy baked potato route and top with chopped Smoky Soy Curls.

Cauliflower quesadilla and a simple salsa in a little bowl I threw on the wheel.

This queso also makes for a delightfully creamy quesadilla.  Spread it between two tortillas and toast on a dry skillet over medium heat, flipping once, until the tortillas have reached that perfectly nutty shade of roasted marshmallow brown.  You’ll never believe that there’s cauliflower inside of every bite.

Cauliflower Queso

Makes about 2 cups of queso

  • ½ head cauliflower (approximately 2 heaping cups), broken into florets
  • 2 tsp extra virgin olive oil, divided
  • ½ small yellow onion (approximately ¾ cup), diced
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • ½ cup non-dairy milk + up to ¼ cup more if necessary (Rice milk is my favorite.)
  • 1 cup Great Northern Beans, drained and rinsed
  • ¼ cup nutritional yeast flakes
  • 1 ½ tsp white miso paste
  • ¼ tsp cumin
  • ½ tsp chili powder
  • 1 tsp hot sauce (Trader Joe’s brand is my favorite)
  • 1 Tbsp pickled jalapeno slices
  • Salt, to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Toss cauliflower florets in 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil and lay evenly across a parchment paper covered baking sheet.  Roast cauliflower for 20 minutes, stopping once to toss for even roasting.

While the cauliflower is roasting, heat a skillet under medium heat, add remaining 1 tsp of extra virgin olive oil to pan.  Sauté onions and garlic in pan for 5 or 6 minutes, until very soft, fragrant, and translucent.  (Turn heat to low if they start to stick.)

In a high speed blender, combine roasted cauliflower, onion and garlic mixture, and the remaining ingredients.  (Be careful not to be too heavy handed with the salt since miso, hot sauce, and pickled jalapeno slices are already salty.)  Blend until the queso is completely smooth and velvety.  If you’d prefer a more liquidy queso, add up to ¼ cup more of non-dairy milk and blend until fully combined.

Only one day left to bid on one of the tantalizing items up for bid on the fundraiser at Hobby and More supporting VSPCA – Visakha Society for Protection and Care of Animals. I donated one of my hand-built bowls, and there are all kinds of cookbooks, food items, jewelry, and more.

Roasted asparagus & chickpeas with sautéed spinach and a salad spinner giveaway

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28

Once the days are lighter later and the temperatures warmer, I begin counting the days until the first farmer’s market of the year.  Seeing the stalls line up and people loading their canvas bags with freshly picked produce means that we’ve survived another winter.  In lieu of a champagne toast, I lift a spear of roasted asparagus.  (After all, what ties better with the images of spring and rebirth than this rumored aphrodisiac?)  I find myself eating asparagus almost daily, knowing that the season is short.  While we’ll soon move on to many wonderful things like squash blossoms, bing cherries, and raspberries, asparagus’ days are numbered.

Today’s recipe is a celebration of all that is in season and taking center stage at my farmer’s market – the aforementioned asparagus, garlic, spring onions, and spinach.  I roast chickpeas and asparagus (my favorite way to cook it), and then add it to a pan of spinach sautéed with garlic and onions, and dotted with the tart and tangy flavors of lemon juice and capers.  I like to serve it over my easy breakfast polenta.  However, it would be a mouthwatering spring meal over any grain, like farro, brown rice, or barley.

To spin dry my spinach for the recipe, I used the salad spinner I recently received from the folks at OXO.  As part of their Blogger Outreach Program,  OXO sent me one of their salad spinners for review and additionally one to offer to a reader (U.S. only) in a giveaway.  Although I already had a salad spinner, mine didn’t get a ton of use.  For one thing, it has these large, unfortunate air holes at the bottom of the unit.  I don’t know who thought that would be a good idea for the design, but it means that my countertops get an impromptu cleaning every time that I use it.  (Perhaps I should be glad for this bonus feature?)  So I generally just line a kitchen towel on the countertop, rinse all of my leafy greens and vegetables, and then pat them dry with another towel.  This actually works out okay since I’m rarely just using leafy greens, and so I’d need a towel for other vegetables and fruits anyway.

The OXO salad spinner has a pump at the top that can be hidden into the unit during storage, and it even has a brake, which is my favorite feature.  It makes me feel like I’m operating one of those Silly Silo style-rides at amusement parks, in which park goers stick to the walls.  It’s BPA-free and top-rack dishwasher safe, which is useful when it requires more than a rinse.  Most importantly, it dries greens nicely.  The only possible negative is that it’s ten inches across in diameter.  If you have limited kitchen space, that may be problematic.  If cupboard storage isn’t an issue, it means that one can pack a lot of produce into the center bowl.

To enter the OXO salad spinner giveaway, simply leave a comment below telling me about your favorite, must-have kitchen gadget.  Make sure to enter an email address into the appropriate field (if you don’t have a blog), so that I can contact you if you’re the big winner.  The contest is open to U.S. residents only and will be chosen randomly.  The contest will end May 31, 2012 at midnight, CST.

Roasted asparagus & chickpeas with sautéed spinach

Serves 2

  • 1 heaping cup asparagus, chopped into bite-sized pieces
  • ½ tsp + ½ tsp + 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 cup cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed
  • 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast flakes (optional)
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • ¼ cup spring onions, chopped (Any variety onions or shallots will work here)
  • 2 cups spinach, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 tsp capers
  • Salt, to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.  Put asparagus on one baking sheet and toss with ½ tsp extra virgin olive oil.  Toss chickpeas, nutritional yeast, and ½ tsp extra virgin olive oil on second baking sheet.  Put both baking sheets in the oven and roast chickpeas and asparagus for 20 minutes, stopping once to shake the pans so that they roast evenly.

While the asparagus and chickpeas are roasting, heat a pan to a medium heat.  Add 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil to pan and sauté the onions and garlic 5-8 minutes, until fragrant and translucent.  Add spinach to pan and sauté for one to two minutes more, until the spinach has wilted but before it becomes gummy and overcooked.  Add lemon juice to deglaze the pan.  Add capers and combine.  Remove from heat and set aside.

Once the asparagus and chickpeas have finished roasting, add them to the pan with the spinach mixture.  Fully combine and salt to taste.  Serve the Roasted Asparagus & Chickpeas with Sautéed Spinach on creamy polenta, farro, rice, or barley.

Disclaimer:  I received two salad spinners free of charge from OXO, one for myself and one to give away.  I didn’t receive any payment otherwise, and the opinions above are totally my own. 

Double Lentil and Mushroom Barley Soup

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If there were two foods that were made for each other, it’s peanut butter and chocolate.  This isn’t about them, but in the sake of full disclosure, I felt I should mention it.  If there were two other foods that were made for each other, it’s lentils and collard greens.  The earthiness of lentils with the vaguely tinny taste of collard greens melt in the mouth and eat like a meal.  Together they are hearty and rich in a stick-with-you kind of way.

For that reason, collards and lentils play a consistent part in my weekly meals.  I love making a batch of slowly cooked, garlicky greens and topping them with brown lentils in coarse mustard.  On days when soup fits the bill, it’s this Double Lentil Mushroom and Barley Soup that calls my name.  This is my current favorite soup, and I make it regularly.  Sometimes I make it with less mushrooms, sometimes with more.  Sometimes I make it with farro or brown rice instead of barley or leeks instead of onions.   Sometimes I make it with garlic, and sometimes I make it with even more garlic.   Any way it’s modified, it always turns out beautifully.  This is the kind of soup that I’d want if I was starting to feel a bit under the weather, because with all of that garlic and collard green goodness, surely I’d snap out of it by the time my bowl ran dry.

Initially I always made this soup with brown lentils alone, and then one day my husband stepped in to make it.  After the soup was ready he called me in from the kitchen.  “We were out of brown lentils, and so I used red,” he said.  I anticipated that it wouldn’t turn out that way since red lentils just kind of disintegrate, but as it happened, it was quite a discovery.  The red lentils made for a creamier soup that is more dense.  By adding a mixture of brown and red lentils, we get the toothsome quality provided by the brown lentils along with a fuller viscosity thanks to the red lentils.

Lately I’ve been making this soup by dry sautéing the mushrooms to start.  Then I’m able to sauté the garlic and onions in the mushroom liquid.  I’ve read varying opinions on how to best do this.  Some people claim that the mushrooms should be stirred constantly.  Some people vote for a low or medium-low heat.  My preferred method is adding sliced mushrooms to a large, dry soup pot on a medium to medium-high heat and not overcrowding them or moving them too much.  My experience has been that if I leave them alone, they get all hot and bothered within a few minutes, and I’m able to use that mushroom liquid for sautéing instead of oil.  By the time the liquid has burnt off, I add a couple of tablespoons of extra dry vermouth to deglaze the pan, and that does the trick for the remaining sautéing until I add water or broth to the pot.  If you would prefer going the regular route and using oil instead, feel free to sauté the onions and garlic in a teaspoon or so of oil, and then add mushrooms and continue as followed in the directions.

Double Lentil & Mushroom Barley Soup

Serves 4-6

  • 14 white button or cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced
  • 8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 small red onion, chopped small
  • 2 Tbsp extra dry vermouth
  • 6 cups vegetable broth or 6 cups water + 1 vegetable bouillon cube
  • ¾ cup brown lentils, rinsed and sorted
  • ½ cup red lentils, rinsed and sorted
  • 1/3 cup barley, rinsed
  • 2 cups collard greens, rib removed, chopped small
  • 1 tsp herbs de Provence
  • ¼ tsp smoked salt (Yakima applewood smoked salt is my favorite)
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Heat large soup pot on a medium heat.  Add mushrooms to dry soup pot, spread evenly across bottom.  Warm mushrooms until they release their liquid, stirring only occasionally.  Once they have released enough liquid to sauté, lower the heat and add garlic and onions to sauté in mushroom liquid.  Once the liquid dries off and the onions and garlic start to stick, add extra dry vermouth to deglaze the pan.  Continue cooking until the garlic and onions are translucent and fragrant.  Add vegetable broth (or water and bouillon cube, if using), brown and red lentils, and barley to pot.  Bring heat to medium high until boiling.  Lower to simmer and add collard greens.  Cover with lid and cook for 40 minutes.  Add herbs de Provence, smoked salt, and salt and pepper to taste.  This will make a hearty and stew-like soup, but if you prefer it more liquidy, add water or broth as necessary.   Serve with roasted garlic and crusty bread or marinated olives.

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