People who love to cook are my favourite kinds of people (and people who love to eat, too). The best part of my job is getting to hang out with cooks in their kitchens – home cooks, chefs, butchers, bakers – anyone who likes to make delicious things. Last fall, the chefs at the still relatively new veggie-heavy Ten Foot Henry shared the recipe for their whole roasted cauliflower with me for a Thanksgiving story, and I’ve been meaning to share it here ever since. I mean, how beautiful is this? If you’re looking for something stunning as a main event that isn’t a chunk of meat, this is it. I just want to look at it. There are several layers here, but they’re easy to stir together – I love the idea of a whole cauliflower, but you could do the same thing with cauliflower steaks: cut thick slabs of cauliflower and cook them in butter (or oil! or ghee!) in a hot panContinue reading

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I know, it (kind of) defeats the purpose of eating cauliflower to deep fry it and serve it with lemony mayo. (Then again, if you’re going to eat fried food, you may as well get a cauliflower out of it.) Parka season = beer batter season, right? And when everyone has planted themselves on the couch for a hockey game or movie or rousing game of Munchkin, they inevitably want to eat something. And I like it when that something can fall simultaneously into multiple categories: 1) salty, 2) dippy, and 3) edible with fingers. (And truly, a platter of crudites and dip never gets a welcome response on a snowy Saturday night.) Cauliflower florets have a lovely creamy texture and mellow flavour, but if you’re like me, once you have a bowl of batter and a pot of oil at your disposal, you may go a little nuts, deep-frying anything you can find in your fridge. (I imagine a zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced,Continue reading

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I know, it’s such a cliché to present you with a whole cauliflower on the second of January, especially after a month-long parade of butter, sugar and bread. And perhaps it’s the decades of conditioning, or the fact that my Christmas season starts the first week of November, but at this point in the picture I tend to hit a wall (of butter, sugar and bread) and really, truly just want some vegetables. (Sadly, this doesn’t prevent me from wanting the last of the Toblerone too.) Of course I’m easing into this whole veggie thing with a healthy dose of cream. Apologies for the iPhone pics taken in the dark, but this was concocted well before dawn for CBC. It was so magically delicious that I have to share. A whole roasted cauliflower is very pinterest-y these days, but I’ve never actually done it myself. Some techniques have you boil the cauliflower first, simmering it for 15-20 minutes in a mixture of wine and herbs,Continue reading

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