Cauliflower Gratin

This is part 2 of about 4 in my attempt to catch up writing about the dishes I've made. Trusty iPhoto says I downloaded the pictures in this post from the camera on October 5th. This dish was inspired by a mediocre-sized head of cauliflower we received in our CSA. You can see it below, hidden slightly behind the horseradish. Notice that it's not nearly as pretty looking as the store-bought head next to it, but hey, it also didn't travel 5,000 miles to get to my cutting board. It's probably a good thing we got it in the CSA. If we hadn't, this dish was in jeopardy of never getting made. See, cauliflower just doesn't do it for me. I'm not sure why, I just don't really like it. I think it smells weird, tastes weird, and feels funny. All that said, I promised to myself I'd keep an open mind throughout all of this.


The other ingredients in the picture are, kind of from left to right: butter, cream, parsley, nutmeg, bay leaf, vinegar, panko, curry powder, horseradish, Emmentaler cheese, and shallot.

The first step was to prepare the cauliflower. I did this by removing the leaves and cutting away the florets. The cores were set aside for use in this dish, and the florets were chopped into smallish pieces:



There is kind of an odd skin on the core, so I peeled that off and chopped the remaining core before placing it in the food processor:



I let the processor run for a solid minute to puree the core, only to find myself a little short of the required 1 cup. In went a few florets, and a few seconds later I was all set:


That's the end of the prep work associated with this dish. From this point on, it's pretty straightforward. I blanched the florets in a pot of water, salt, and vinegar (the vinegar keeps the florets white).

I added butter and shallot to a saucepan and let that cook for a minute or two to soften the shallot up:


I added to that some seasonings, the bay leaf, thyme and parsley. I added to that the cauliflower puree, and to that I added a little under a cup of water. That all turned into a milky white sauce that didn't really smell that good:


After that had cooked down a little bit, I added the cream and simmered the mixture for two minutes. I took the sauce off the heat and fished out all of the items that don't belong in a sauce.


The sauce made its way over to the blender and received a few gratings of curry powder. It looks kind of like egg nog, but trust me, it's not:


Once the mixture had cooled a little bit, I added the horseradish and blended everything until it was smooth as silk. Not really. I gave it about fifteen seconds and called it good. I tossed this sauce with the florets and seasoned the whole things with more salt, pepper, and some fresh nutmeg.

It all fit nicely into a medium-sized casserole dish, which I placed in the fridge for about an hour to let the flavors meld. This is a critical step, lest the cauliflower-flavored cauliflower puree not blend well with the cauliflower-flavored cauliflower florets.


While that was chilling in the fridge, I heated the oven to 450 degrees. I took the dish out, sprinkled it with the cheese and panko, and put that sucker in the oven for about 25 minutes. The tops were looking deliciously browned, so I broiled it for a minute or two as well. Out came this:


The lighting in these last two pictures doesn't really do the dish justice. It looked great. There was bubbling cheese, browned cauliflower florets, everything you would expect.


Unfortunately for me, the list of things I expected did not include great taste. I make absolutely no claims that this was the recipes fault. In fact, in an unofficial survey, 100% of the other taster's that enjoy cauliflower though the dish was really good. It's just not for me I guess. I'll eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beets, but you can keep the cauliflower.

Glazed Vegetables

The decision to make this dish was based entirely on the plethora of root vegetables that we've been receiving from our CSA. We're getting nearly ten pounds a week, and eating it all is more than challenging. We've had root vegetables in just about every possible way you can imagine. First it was beets, then potatoes, turnips and carrots.

The glazed vegetable section is a little unique to the book. There is a recipe for just 'Glazed Vegetables' which can be used for any type of vegetable you would ever want to glaze. Following that, there are individual recipes for single vegetables that cater a little more to that particular vegetable by adjusting herbs and spices and that kind of thing.

I chose the generic recipe because of my selection of vegetables. You can see below that I had orange and red carrots, turnips, and pearl onions. How disappointing is it that red carrots are orange under the skin and not red like we're all led to believe? My disappointment would not come without a consolation prize though. It turns out each vegetable has to be cooked in its own pot to avoid bleeding of colors, so I was able to put both of the carrots types into a single pot. Hooray nature! Here's the starting material:


These are not your grocery store vegetables that have been bred to look nice and uniform. These are all very different in shape and size and covered in dirt. Imagine that, dirt on your food. Anyway, this makes cooking with them a touch harder since it's a little more difficult to carve equal sized pieces.

The first step was to peel and carve all of the vegetables. It was a lot of peeling, turning my sink into a vegetable wasteland.


Keller gives a couple of options for carving the vegetables into edible sized pieces. These include small balls and "turning" them. When you turn them, or tourner for you Frenchies, you end up with a seven sided football kind of thing. I tried this a couple of times and decided it wasn't for me. What was for me was this: I started by cutting the carrots and turnips into boxes about 2"x.5"x.5". I quickly turned the four sided shape into an extruded octagon by chopping off each of the four corners of the box. It's pretty hard to write about, but very easy to actually do. By no means is it as cool as turning, but it's a lot more achievable, especially if you don't have three hours to sit around and carve shapes out of vegetables. One thing about all this carving is that is creates a lot of waste, which isn't great at all, but I'm sure you can find a use for random small pieces of turnips if you really want to.

As I mentioned earlier, each vegetable is cooked separately at the beginning to avoid the bleeding of colors. You can see here that I had the vegetables and a set of seasonings for each. These included a bay leaf, some peppercorns, and some fresh thyme.


I put each vegetable in a saucepan and just covered them with cold water. I added some butter, sugar, and the seasonings along with some salt to each pot.


I brought the water to a boil, reduced the heat and let it simmer for about half an hour. The book said ten minutes, but I'm now used to the fact that the books times are nearly always shorter than what it ends up taking for me to complete each step.

Because it took the liquid took so long to reduce I took the vegetables out of when they were tender. After the liquid had finished doing its thing and turned into a glaze, the veggies went back into their respective pots. I again seasoned them with a bit of salt.


Some vigorous shaking of the pots ensured equal coverage of all pieces. At this point everything was removed from the heat and put in a bowl to wait for dinner time a couple of hours later.

To prep everything for serving, all of the vegetables went into a single saucepan to be reheated. After I tasted a carrot for seasoning, they got transferred to individual serving plates and garnished with some fresh chives.


Now these are probably some of the coolest pictures I've taken so far, so here's another one:


Not only did the pictures turn out well, so did the vegetables. They were cooked very well, tender throughout but not mushy by any means. The glaze was sweet, but not too sweet. The herbs added a layer of complexity beyond just the veggies and glaze. It's something I'd make again given an abundance of root vegetables, or possibly as a side dish at a big meal. They were gone by the end of dinner, so they must of been well received, right?

Sauteed Spinach with Garlic Confit

Most kids don't like spinach. It, for some reason, is the stereotypical sound of fear for everyone under the age of 12 at the dinner table. I was included in this group, except for my membership lasted until about the age of 25. I've recently changed my tune a little bit, and I now enjoy spinach on occasion. This would be one of those occasions.

I made this to go with the trout from last week, and it was perfect in multiple ways. It's a single pan dish, which accompanied the three pan trout dish on my four burner stove. It needs almost no attention, and you can pretty much do it at the last minutes. That, and the prep is really easy (If you happen to have garlic confit laying around. You probably don't, but I did and it was starting to go bad). Anyway, the only other ingredients are butter, shallots, and spinach. Easy, right? I know!

I melted the butter in a sauce pan. Because I'm shameless, here's the same picture that I used in the trout post so that you can see the extra exciting melting butter. That's it in on the back burner:

There's probably a stick of butter on those two burners. It was not necessarily a healthy night. Once the butter was melted, the shallots went in for a minute, and then the garlic confit, some salt, and pepper. As much spinach as you can fit in your pan goes into the butter mixture, and you slowly add more and more as it wilts until it's all in there. I turned the spinach occasionally to ensure an even buttery coating throughout, and everything was done in just minutes. Now there's no way to take a glamorous looking picture of wilted spinach coated with butter, but here's my attempt:

This was probably the best spinach I've ever had. It was buttery, garlickly, and I guess spinachy. The spell checker had to work extra hard on that last sentence. I would make this again pretty much any time I want to. I assume it the basic butter, garlic, greens combo would work without regard to your choice of green, but do that at your own risk. Or be safe and use spinach, because that's delicious.

Chilled Asparagus with Vinaigrette and Eggs Mimosa

All right, mimosas for everyone! Let's get drunk. No, not really. They say you learn something everyday, and on this day I learned that a Mimosa is actually a plant. Or maybe a tree. Either way, at least some of the species has yellowish-orange flowers. Hence the naming of the drink and the eggs mimosa part of this dish. This was also the first dish I was able to find a picture of the version actually prepared at Bouchon. The original blog, which contains a review of Bouchon and is very good in itself, can be found here. The dish is supposed to look something like this, so I had something to go on this time:


Let's get started. The ingredients here are pretty straightforward. That theme would follow throughout the day, as this dish was one of the easiest I've yet made. It's essentially asparagus, hard-cooked egg yolks, radishes, vinaigrette, and chives plus some seasonings.


Can't find the chives or vinaigrette in the picture? Oh, well, they blend in with the table. Just look more closely.

I started by blanching the asparagus, transferring them to an ice bath, draining them when cool, and setting them aside. Wait, you did know to break off the woody ends, trim them so that they're exactly the same length, peel them and then tie them in bundles to protect their gentle tips, right? Good.

Next up for the same treatment was a couple of cups of the asparagus trimmings. These got cooked a little longer and then pureed with just a tiny bit of the cooking water. I blended them into a coulis that would form the base of the finished plate. When I say blended, I mean really blended. For a long time. With a lot of scraping. Homogeneous doesn't begin to describe the end result.


Looks pretty great, right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. That said it was surprisingly good and pretty strongly asparagus flavored. There was going to be no shortage of bad smelling pee on this night.

After painstakingly peeling the hard cooked eggs and getting rid of the pesky whites, I pushed all of the yolks through a cheese grater. What came out looked more or less like I'd just stepped on the yolks and picked it all up and put it in a pile. Next time I'll probably just chop them up and save a little time and a dirty dish.

Now that all of the essential parts have been put in place, it was assembly time. I, as mentioned above, started with the coulis. Then down when the asparagus.


Things were getting salted and peppered and pretty much every stage now. On top of the asparagus went some vinaigrette, then the egg yolks, radishes, and chives. The finished dish looked something like this:


See how I stuck that flash in there to try and make things look a little brighter? Way to go me. I thought this was pretty outstanding, if not almost a meal in itself. The coulis and then egg yolks were fairly rich, and my god were there a lot of egg yolks. Kendra thought the eggs were a little over the top, and I didn't use more than 2/3 of what the recipe had called for. All that richness was balanced out by the vinaigrette, and the asparagus was fantastic. This currently takes the cake for vegetables so far. That really only means it beat the beets, but it was very good none the less. There were no major firsts for me in this one, but blanching is relatively new to me, so it was nice to see that turn out well.