Spicy Roasted Cauliflower with Tahini

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather lately and decided to have some soup that I had in my cupboard for dinner but of course, soup is never enough. So since I had half a head of cauliflower left in my fridge I figured I might as well sift through my recipes and see what I could try to make. I landed on a recipe from Savuer for a roasted Cauliflower and figured I’d try it as a filling post dinner snack-ish whatever you want to call it.

This is a simple recipe and I had everything I needed (minus jalapeños because I’m not a huge fan, or cilantro which is the garnish). I’ve been wanting to try this recipe for awhile because the photo looked so good and I love cauliflower so I mixed it with everything needed: salt, turmeric, paprika, olive oil, and garlic. I tossed the cauli, roasted it in the oven, and 45ish mins later it was ready to eat. I topped it with a little lemon to brighten it up and had my tahini (store bought, sorry!) standing by. This came out so bright and beautifully roasted and I was so happy with the outcome. It tasted pretty good, though the florets soaked up much more seasoning than the stems so I had to calculate my bites to make sure everything was balanced. I guess since I didn’t have jalapeños it wasn’t really spicy and I would’ve liked the little heat kick that it mentioned but the lemon and tahini balanced the flavor really well and it was so easy to make this is for sure something I could do in the future to add some flavor and color to extra cauli laying around. Simple and tasty.

Latkas

I’m no where near being Jewish but I love potatoes and that’s enough reason for me to make some Latkas. When you watch a Bon Appetit video with Carla Lalli Music and Miz Cracker and potatoes are involved, you get inspired. Watching these two make Latkas is just too fun and they both make this look simple and doable. The video links to a recipe but if you watch you realize it’s not exactly what they’re making so I used the online recipe as a guide for measurements and tried to stick to the video as much as possible.

This wasn’t terribly difficult to make though I won’t lie, I did manage to cut myself on my new grater while grating potatoes. It’s not the best and while I was going through the potatoes I knew it was going to happen. Minor injuries of the kitchen. While drying out the onions they totally got me and had me tearing up too. Concentrated onion water is real guys. Aside from these small hiccups, the latkes came together very easily and mine were a little wetter than Carla’s and Miz Cracker’s. I think I had too much egg and then tried to make up for it with a little more flour and my latkes ended up a little pancake-ier than I was hoping for. I love that potato-y flavor and texture and I wish I was a little more careful and thought about my adjustments with the egg and flour. Still very good in the end and I was pretty proud of myself with how I fried them. Maybe next time I’ll just make a hash?

Roasted Aloo Gobi (Potatoes and Cauliflower)

The Bon Appetit test kitchen has been adding a couple of small appearances by new cooks and Priya Krishna has been one of them. She’s been a little slow to grow on me and has a cute personality but seems a little more home cook-y and less professionally trained. This isn’t a bad thing because you learn a lot from being in kitchens and not all good cooks need to go to culinary school, but when a cook doesn’t have great knife skills I’m a little hesitant to learn from them. Priya mostly cooks Indian dishes from her cookbook Indian-ish which I kind of love the title of. Clearly Priya is like me and has a mix of traditional and American culture so I like the idea of cooking in an ‘-ish’ sort of manner. I also do like Indian food though I don’t get to eat it much especially here in Cortland (there are no Indian restaurants here so I’d have to make the trip to a nearby town and hope for the best) so Priya’s recipes are definitely interesting to me because I’d love to give that type of cuisine a shot at home. I also love vegetables and since a lot of Indian dishes are vegetarian oriented I tend to enjoy the concept a lot. That’s why when I saw her video for Aloo Gobi and realized it was just a mix of cauliflower and potatoes I was 100% in.

I really appreciate Bon Appetit and Priya for making Indian dishes available and accessible to the masses. Priya’s casual manner make the recipes approachable - if she can make these things, I’m gonna give it a shot too. Her recipe is super easy and I even had time to cut up some chicken and cook that while the veggies were in the oven to mix in with them later. I could use a little more of a kick with spices but this was such an easy dish to make and it seriously has everything I need in it. I did skip out on fresh cilantro leaves and ginger because I didn’t have any but i was totally fine without it this time. This is a go-to recipe for sure now. I’m already excited to make it again and I still have leftovers in my fridge today for lunch.

2nd day update: So this was still pretty good the second day, reheated but the potatoes totally didn’t hold up well. They got a little dried out in the middle and the texture was off but everything mixed together wasn’t too bad. Moral of the story is eat it all while it’s fresh. Easy.

Pasta al Limone

With the holidays coming and traveling ramps up, I’ve had a little less time to cook and try new recipes. I will say I’ve made a couple dishes that haven’t been very noteworthy or photogenic so I’ve opted out of writing about them but I figured I’d throw in a dish today to keep the ball rolling. I had the day off yesterday and had a amazingly lazy day with some grocery shopping and a couple new recipe tests including Bon Appetit’s pasta al limone by Molly Baz. This is a super simple recipe and I’m surprised it’s not a Basically dish because there are 5 ingredients plus salt and pepper and it takes about 10-15mins to make. Super easy and worth while. Molly makes a really quick video of it that is easy to follow and a cream based pasta with a hint of citrus is a little adventurous without being crazy hard to imagine. Obviously when you make cream sauces like Alfredo, they can be heavy but adding a hint of lemon is so logical and would brighten up the dish a lot. Caleb has shown very little interest in the lemon so I’ve decided to make this for myself instead.

Like I said, this was a super easy recipe with minimal prep of ingredients. Boil pasta, make the sauce while the pasta is cooking, toss and stir. I’m having mixed feelings about this dish though. The first few bites were amazing and I was hooked but as I kept eating I had hard time adjusting to the cheese and lemon flavor being together. Each bite finishes with a lemon-y tang which I think I enjoy? While I was eating I kept going back and forth; not bad but I don’t think I’ll make this again/it’s so tangy and fresh I want more. Honestly, I made to servings and I’m super excited to have some again for lunch really soon, but I have a feeling I might be over it halfway through only to be excited to make it again sometime. Moral of the story? - Give it a shot, it’s a simple yet fun dish for sure and it’s got me intrigued.

Chocapocalypse Cookies

I’ve been meaning to make these for awhile and Caleb actually bought a kitchen scale so it was the perfect time to break out the recipe for Alton Brown’s Chocapocalypse cookies. Don’t be fooled by the maze of recipe links on the food network site because they just lead to chocolate chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. This is the real recipe from the Good Eats season 8 special. Of course, Alton does his baking recipes by weight so I could try to convert them to rough cup measurements but the point was the be exact so I was stalling on these cookies. Luckily I got to use Caleb’s scale in exchange for cookies and gave these guys a shot.

I know I’ve said I don’t really like eating chocolate that much but that doesn’t mean I can’t bake chocolate things. I just don’t tend to eat them. Sharing is caring and no one is complaining so I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

This was the first time I’ve used baking chocolate in bars and it was a trick for sure but I felt petty legit hacking away at a bar. I didn’t have much success chopping it especially in a relatively cold house but I did make a ton of noise if that’s what you want to call a success. So my chocolate chunks were probably larger than intended but it worked out overall. These cookies are seriously chocolatey and there’s a lot of dark 100% chocolate so I’ve been warning people but they’re still really good. It’s a super easy cookie to make and my batch yielded 18 cookies which isn’t too bad. I’m pretty sure I portion a little larger generally but that’s okay. Fewer cookies to give away this time. They baked off super evenly and crisp up really well. I probably could’ve gone a couple more minutes to get them a little crisper and a little less soft in the middle but these were still good especially after they cooled and set a little more. Those chocolate chunks were pretty large too so that also too a little while to set and getting a bite of dark chocolate in the middle of a dark chocolate cookie is sharp.

Basically, these are easy and fun to make but need a safety warning before eating.