Best Cauliflower EVER

caulicaper1 Before you get annoyed that the title of this post is dramatic without being descriptive, consider the following: this recipe has 6 ingredients, including salt. It takes 25 minutes start to finish and is easily the most delicious cauliflower dish I I've ever had ever ever. Ever. Better to tell the world how wonderful it is than to try to name what can only be described as good, yes?

Now then, let me tell you about cauliflower with capers and sherry vinegar. That's all that's in this -- save for a drizzle or two of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt -- but it's good, lip-smackingly good. No surprise that it comes from the king of simple, Mark Bittman, and his wonderful bible "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian." Having cooked from it and read many chapters straight through, I think I can safely say that it's the best $23.10 you can spend in the cookbook section. Check it out here.

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No recipe, really -- here's how it works. Slice a whole head of cauliflower into florets, and put them in a reasonably wide (8x8 or 9x13 are both fine) shallow baking pan. Drizzle with a couple tablespoons of olive oil, toss to coat, and roast in a 400-degree oven for about 25 minutes, tossing a couple times during roasting, until a fork pierces the florets easily and they are deep brown in spots. Remove from the oven, and sprinkle with 1/2 a tsp. of salt, 1 clove of chopped garlic, 2 tablespoons of sherry or red wine vinegar, and 2-3 tablespoons of capers. (I just discovered the ones preserved in salt: you need to rinse them thoroughly, but they have such a wonderfully strong caper-y flavor that's not overwhelmed as the traditional vinegar-preserved capers often are.) Put them back in the oven for 3 more minutes, toss, and serve warm or at room temperature. It truly doesn't get easier than that, now does it?

Thanksgiving confession and pep-talk

squash.JPG Confession: I'm going to Detroit this year with D and fam, and will not be cooking any T-day fare as I did last year. Sorry to desert!

Pep-talk: I would be remiss to leave you empty-handed as you tackle your Turkey, tofurky, and other accoutrement. With that in mind, I've written a page of vegetarian recipes that I deem Tday-worthy. Are they particularly traditional? No, not necessarily -- but they're pretty darn tasty. If you're bored of the same old turkey-stuffing-mashed spuds triumvirate, click over to this page for fresh inspiration. Hey -- even if you're not cooking T-day dinner, this page offers some pretty good suggestions for everyday eats. Click away!

Soupergirl

souper5.jpg I'm taking time out from my regularly-scheduled programming to tell you about an awesome new business being launched in the DC area: it's called Soupergirl, and (if you couldn't guess) it's a soup business! A friend of mine, Sara Polon, not to be at all confused with Sarah Palin (who will NOT be our next VP, thank you very much!!) launched Soupergirl this Thursday, and starting ever-so-soon, you can get fresh, delicious soups delivered to a location nearby!

souper7.jpg Sara uses as much local produce as possible in making her soups; as it so happens, all her soups are vegan -- but they hardly skimp on flavor: I've tried the black bean chili, the pureed chickpea, the pumpkin tomato, the black-eyed pea and mustard green, and others, and let me tell you....delicious.

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Did I mention that I did the photos for her site? My very first gig!

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So how was I lucky enough to taste all these soups? Well, Sara's been holding tastings for months now, pressure-testing her recipes with discerning and hungry friends of hers. But that's not how I tried them. Nope -- I tried them at our photoshoot this Sunday!

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Yes, folks, you heard me correctly -- I, amateur photographer with no real knowledge of this stuff, took the photos for Sara's website! So not only did I politely dunk my spoon fingers into every soup, I also got handsomely paid with two large containers of the stuff. I'm a happy lady.

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So if you're in the DC area, check out soupergirl....I can guarantee you, my tastebuds were singin' after tasting Sara's soups, and yours can be, too. www.thesoupergirl.com. Try it, you'll like it!

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The thing about recipes

When we cook, we use ingredients and we employ techniques. There is an abundance of information about these ingredients and techniques; some of it we know, some we could really stand to learn. When does an ingredient perform best? How does it behave in different combinations and conditions? When is a given technique best employed? Which steps are absolutely necessary and which can be skipped in a pinch?

We know much of this information already. To give a few examples:

  1. Eggs make dishes lighter. Whipping the egg whites? Even more so.
  2. Onions and garlic contain a lot of natural sugar that will caramelize and mellow when heated.
  3. Applesauce and yogurt are viable alternatives to the fatty liquids in baked goods.

There's a lot of other information we could really stand to learn. Here are some things I'm thankful to have learned from cookbooks, food articles, and plain old trial-and-error:

  1. a good dish balances the five dimensions of taste: sweet, sour, salty, hot, and umami (i.e. glutamate, which rounds out the other flavors)
  2. baking powder contains its own acidic agent; baking soda needs some sort of acid to be activated.
  3. Lots of time, little yeast, and no kneading can produce one of the best loaves of bread ever invented.

So you see, there's a lot of knowledge floating around out there about what we eat and how we make it. Recipes can be useful in providing bite-sized chunks of information in digestible form (no more food metaphors). But here's the thing about recipes: they transmit that information so absolutely, so authoritatively, that the cook feels reluctant, even scared, to change anything. Recipes are what make you stand by the oven, wiping your brow, because your quiche didn't cook in the half-hour promised. They're what make you think twice about even making a quiche, if you don't have the requisite amount of mushrooms for the mushroom one, cheddar for the cheddar one, etc. You could run to the grocery store at the last minute and buy exactly 2 1/2 cups of mushrooms, a mix of button, cremini and portabello as called for. Alternatively, you could save yourself the headache and improvise.

Improvisation: friend, not foe.

I treat recipes not as rules, but as inspiration. This is how I was raised. With the exception of my dad's Sunday-morning fannie farmer pancakes, my mom's linzer torte and a couple other unchanged family staples, almost everything I ate growing up was a product of cookbook and creativity.

Take Thanksgiving as an example of how we operate. My mom and I wrote up a menu skeleton -- brothy soup, cornbread, "main" or some sort, two chutneys/sauces, squash with something, interesting stuffing, vegetable, three pies -- and then looked at about 30 recipes online for inspiration. What we gathered from our reading was as follows:

  • the NYT dining section had a great recipe for broccoli rabe strata that we'd riff on for our main dish.
  • lots of cranberry chutney recipes call for chilies, so we'd include some in our sauce.
  • mushroom soup is flavorful without being heavy, so it's the perfect start to a big meal.
  • a rice recipe calling for cranberries and apple cider would be perfect with bread as stuffing.

We used this to draft our shopping list. Once we had all the ingredients, making the food was a processes of taste-and-adjust. I admit that it takes a lot of practice to get good at this. The more food you make, the better your palate becomes.

People have written countless posts, articles, even books, about the ease (and importance!) of adjusting recipes. Chief among them is this, my favorite quote from chef Michael Ruhlman's newest book, The Elements of Cooking, which I read cover-to-cover in a Barnes & Noble one afternoon. Modeled after Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, it's practically a dictionary of the actual elements of cooking (heat, etc), the terms used in foreign (mostly French) kitchens, as well as basic ingredients. Here's what he has to say about recipes:

Recipes are not assembly manuals. You can’t use them the way you use instructions to put together your grill or the rec room Ping-Pong table. Recipes are guides and suggestions for a process that is infinitely nuanced. Recipes are sheet music. A Bach cello suite can be performed at a beginner’s level or given extraordinary interpretation by Yo-Yo Ma—same notes/ingredients, vastly different outcomes.

How to use a good recipe: First read it and think about it. Cook it in your mind. Envision what it will look like when you serve it. Try to know the outcome before you begin. Read a recipe all the way through not only to understand it generally, but to make your work more efficient and to avoid making errors or taking unnecessary steps. Perhaps a dough needs to chill for an hour in the middle of a preparation, perhaps meat needs to be salted for twenty-four hours, or a liquid must be simmered, then cooled. The recipe suggests adding the flour, baking powder, and salt one at a time, but perhaps you can combine all the dry ingredients ahead of time while you’re waiting for the butter to get to room temperature so you can cream it with the eggs. Taking a few minutes to read a recipe, acting out each step in your mind as you do, will save you time and prevent errors.

Measure out or prep all your ingredients before you begin. Don’t mince your onion just before you need to put it in the pan, have it minced and in a container ready to go, have that cup of milk and half cup of sugar set out before you. Good mise en place makes the process easier and more pleasurable and the result tastier than preparing a recipe with no mise en place.

If you’re unsure about an instruction, use your common sense. You’ve already imagined in your head what the goal is. Work toward that goal using all your senses.

How to perfect a good recipe: Do it over again. And again. Pay attention. Do it again. That’s what chefs do. Often great cooking is simply the result of having done it over and over and over while paying attention. Great cooking is as much about sheer repetition as it is about natural skill or culinary knowledge. - Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

If that's not clear, recipes are blueprints, not rulebooks. Play around a bit in the kitchen, and as always, trust your gut. Unless you think you're a horrible cook; in that case, you can always trust my gut. :)

I'd love to hear feedback from you lovely readers out there in cyberspace: how do you consult recipes? Are there steps you chronically skip or mess up? What are your sources for inspiration when it comes to adapting recipes? Please -- do share!