Feeding Friendship Kicks Off!

I'm pleased to announce that this will be the first of many "Feeding Friendship" posts. Ellie, Veronica, and I decided to start a joint food blog to share our love of cooking and to keep in touch more. So, we decided to choose an ingredient or dish every two weeks, each put our own spin on it, and blog about the results. We shared our own Tumblr feed (http://feedingfriendship.tumblr.com/) to put it all in one place and to accept submissions if anyone wants to cook along with us sometimes or all the time and submit their own post. Feel free to join in!

For our inaugural post, Veronica selected our secret ingredient:

 cauliflower!

I'm not going to lie, this one was a challenge for me due to my aversion to (almost) all things vegetable and trying to consider George's expressed distaste for cauliflower. Though I usually intend to highlight our featured ingredient, this time I decided that stealth was the key. My first instinct was to go with a gratin, but the recipes I saw left intact florets of varying sizes in the gratin, and that was flying too far above the radar for my purposes. I eventually decided on cauliflower "mashed potatoes." There's an excellent recipe on FoodNetwork.com from chef George Stella (no, I don't really know of him, but he deserves props anyway) that fit the bill nicely. See here for the recipe.

I began by chopping my cauliflower into small pieces, and realized as I did this what a strange plant I was dealing with. It's crumbly, white instead of green, has bizarre pockets of space in it, and just generally doesn't look like much else on the planet, with the possible exception of broccoli. I honestly think that if you asked a kid from some cauliflower-less society to draw what he thought plants might look like in outer space, you'd have a decent chance of ending up with a picture that looks like cauliflower. I digress. Once chopped, I boiled the pieces for 6-8 minutes.

While it was boiling, I put the cream cheese, parmesan, garlic, butter and spices in a bowl. After draining the cauliflower, I immediately patted the pieces down using paper towels and a pot holder (they're hot!) I dumped the pieces in the bowl with the other ingredients and whipped out my new favorite kitchen device: the immersion blender, aka the motor boat (not that kind of motor boat- shush!). Mom gave me this Breville beauty for Christmas after my last motor boat ended badly in a battle with some slightly undercooked mashed potatoes. Not pretty. This one, however, is both cordless and kick-ass with a rather powerful motor. It turned the hot florets and other ingredients into a smooth, potato-like texture in a flash. It even smelled like mashed potatoes! Behold: 

 

I think the key ingredient here (other than the cream cheese and butter, which I figured could save anything) was the small amount of chicken bullion. I think it gave it just a little extra flavor, and I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Other than the texture, which is a little grainier in your mouth than potatoes, I think this is a very good substitute and one that children (or husbands) won't see coming. I intended to serve mine with a nice grilled pork chop, but it rained today and George is under the weather, so it didn't seem worth it to fire up our old school bbq grill just for 1 lonely pork chop. Thus, my dinner of (lazy) champions:

If I can trick George into trying some next time he's in an eating mood, I'll add a little update on how it went over with him. Until then, consider enjoying some "mashed potatoes" of your own and consider cooking along with Feeding Friendship sometime. Our posts will always be every second Thursday and the Secret Ingredient will be revealed on Tumblr the Friday after that to allow for maximum shopping and schem- er, planning for the next time. I'm picking this time- look out!