Roasted Cauliflower and Red Pepper Soup

So this week I joined a food co-op called Bountiful Baskets. The upside is you get a bunch of fruits and veggies at a good price. The down side is you don't get to choose the fruits and veggies. I made peace with these two facts and accepted the latter as a sort of challenge and an opportunity for serendipitous discovery to take place. So far so good.


This week's challenging veggie? Cauliflower. Well, I'll see your cauliflower and raise you two red peppers! In my search for a suitable recipe, I looked for something hearty, comprising the bulk of a meal. I also wanted something fairly simple with the kind of ingredients I already had in the kitchen (luckily red bell peppers were on special for 99 cents earlier this week.) This delicious Roasted Cauliflower and Red Pepper Soup from Closet Cooking is what I found. It's relatively simple and very healthy.


The cauliflower thickens the soup without the need for an unhealthy roux. You don't have to compromise on taste either. The roasted veggies reward you with a surprising depth of flavor that far surpasses their uncooked counterparts. Add some onion, garlic and a bit of cayenne pepper to turn up the heat. What you have now is a flavor profile that reaches true perfection with a thick dollop of Greek yogurt on top. If you have some thyme on your hands, you can toss a sprig or two on top as a garnish as I did in the picture above. 

Roasted Cauliflower and Red Pepper Soup

Ingredients

• 1 head cauliflower (cut into florets)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• salt and pepper
• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1 onion (chopped)
• 2 cloves garlic (minced)
• 2 roasted red peppers
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
• 3 cups chicken stock

Directions

1. Toss the cauliflower florets in the olive oil with the salt and pepper.
2. Arrange the cauliflower florets in a single layer in a baking dish.
3. Roast the cauliflower in a preheated 400F oven until lightly golden brown, about 20-30 minutes.
4. Heat the oil in a pan.
5. Add the onions and saute until tender, about 5-7 minutes.
6. Add the garlic and saute until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
7. Add the cauliflower, roasted red peppers, cayenne and stock.
8. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer until the cauliflower is tender, about 20 minutes.
9. Puree with a hand blender or food processor.
10. Serve garnished with Greek yogurt.

Kale is hot (and in this case crunchy)

Whole Foods has always struck me as a barometer of food fashions. While casual, comfy stores like Sprouts and Sunflower Market satisfy with their straightforward offerings, Whole Foods dazzles with glitz and glam. 

Looking for fancy cheese? Whole Foods has it, even cave-aged cheese. Looking for local produce? Whole Foods has that covered too. How 'bout an apple from Wilcox, only 272 miles from the store, according to their sign. Looking for a hot dinner? Forget about that rotisserie chicken. At Whole Foods you can have beef brisket, smoked in-house. Yes, Whole Foods gives the foodies what they want. And what do they want? Well, in the deli anyway, the answer seems to be kale. 

While drooling over things like portobello mushroom lasagna and orzo salad  today, I spotted no less than four, that's right, four different types of kale salad! Ladies and gentlemen, we are apparently in the midst of a kale craze. I have no idea when or how it began. Maybe it's like how after buying a new car, you suddenly notice that everyone else is driving the same car. I don't know, all I know is that I bought my first ever bunch of kale earlier this week.

Why kale? Well, I've been trying to eat healthier lately and if you don't already know, Kale is a bit of a health nut's wet dream, a "superfood," if you will.  It's high in vitamins, a powerful antioxidant, and has both cancer-fighting and anti-inflammatory properties. Is there anything that this mighty cabbage can't do? Now that's one sexy veggie! But hey, it's still a veggie. That's why I was excited to find a recipe for kale chips. They're salty, wafer-thin, and have a satisfying crunch.


I made the bunch pictured above this morning and they were gone in no time. Just be sure to go easy on the salt. I didn't actually measure mine out and you can taste every grain on such a paper-thin chip. I got the recipe below from Allrecipes.


Baked Kale Chips


Ingredients

• 1 bunch kale
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. 
2. Remove thick stems from kale and then tear into bite-sized pieces. Wash and dry kale thoroughly. In a bowl, toss kale together with olive oil and salt. 
3. Spread in a single layer on the cookie sheet and bake until edges are brown but not burnt, about 10-15 minutes.

Additional Information
Yields 6 servings. 
Calories: 58  
Total Fat: 2.8 
Cholesterol: 0

The Birth of a Blog

With the holidays approaching and the oppressive heat of Phoenix finally just a scorching memory, cooks across the valley are heating up their ovens and rolling back their sleeves. I'm no exception but until recently, most of my oven heating and sleeve rolling was done in the context of peeling the cellophane off frozen pizzas.

While others gushed about family recipes, I was going through drive-throughs, chowing down at my neighborhood taqueria or frequenting the nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Don't get me wrong, those things are great but, well, I was getting tired of them.

I wasn't looking for a new hobby when I decided to learn to cook. In all actuality, I was probably looking for a new drive-through when the NPR interview with Amanda Hesser, author of The Essential New York Times Cookbook, came on the air. Hesser asked readers to send in their "most stained recipes" from the past 150 years of The New York Times and then spent six years cooking through them. Impressive in it's own right but not nearly as impressive to me as Hesser's description of the readers' most popular recipe submission, Purple Plum Torte:

One, it has Four steps. You look at it, you don't feel intimidated. Most of the ingredients, except for the plums, you probably have at home.... You can mix it up in any order and you can't screw it up. All you have to do is stir and you plop it into a pan and stick the plums on top and the plums sink into the batter and they look like these little inlaid jewels, so it's very beautiful when it comes out of the oven. So if you've never baked before, you think that you've done this masterful recipe.

It was as though she were speaking directly to me. Four steps? You can't screw it up? You'll think you've created a masterpiece? Now we're cooking! Where do I sign up? I googled the recipe and made the torte. It came out just as delicious as promised. Gooey sweet bits of plum punctuating a light, buttery cake moistened by dripping plum juice. The recipe, originally published in 1983, had stood the test of time. It was so worth the tiny effort set forth, it set me on a quest for more quick, easy, delicious recipes, not all of which have been as successful.

One endeavor was Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread, a wildly popular foodie fad that completely passed me by in 2006. Although my first attempt failed to yield an adequately risen loaf, it did leave me with a treasured new addition to my kitchen: my Le Creuset pot. This 3.5 quart enamel-coated cast iron workhorse can go "from the stove to the oven to the table," as they say. I initially started using it as a way to justify the expense to myself (even in the discontinued forest green shade I settled for, it was a lot to spend). Since then I have been browning and braising meats, making gravy and generally preparing the kind of home cooked goodness that a trip through the drive-through could never yield.

We're talking about everything from Classic Pot Roast to Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic to Pork Roast with Peppers. So what if they're not considered gourmet? So what if you can pronounce all the ingredients? These meals make me want to cook more. So, dear readers, thus began my blog.