Steamed Cauliflower Mash

Shadow, one of our cats, has a strange habit of kneading our couch pillows, he can do this for nearly 30 minutes while zoning out and not noticing anything that’s going on around him or that he’s about to get a nasty surprise if he gets too close Smokey, our pushy female cat, who will lay into him if he gets too annoying. Can’t blame her.

But these are our two cats, they’re both rescues we adopted while living in Florida and they like to think they run our house. Except when the chihuahua needs to remind them she runs the house. :-)

I came home to a pleasant surprise on our porch today, another farm box!

This one loaded with tons of greens and I was thrilled to see the kale since I’m out. And I need to break out the juicer this weekend for the beets.

Since I needed to make room in the fridge fast, I pulled out all the veggies that needed to be used up to create dinner. Kind of like Iron Chef home challenge with multiple theme ingredients. Since I’m on a huge salad kick this week, I threw together a nacho hemp seed sauce in the Vita-Mix for a dressing, great opportunity to use up a sad looking red pepper and a couple of carrots.

In the salad I threw in more sauerkraut and sprouted lentils.

And I had an older cauliflower head to use up, so I decided on the miso cauliflower mash from Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen. But, raw cauliflower can be really tough on my stomach, even processed in a food processor. So I steamed the cauliflower first in quarters, then threw it in the food processor with the rest of the ingredients.

It looked a lot like mashed potatoes! The recipe includes a couple of tablespoons of psyllium husk powder, which I had a tub in my pantry from Trader Joe’s, and it did a great job to absorbing extra moisture in the mash and giving it a rich texture. I’ll have to remember that for future recipes.

It also completed another veggie-loaded dinner nicely adding something warm, rich and filling to my salad. The flavor was great, very close to mashed potatoes with a little salty-miso and garlic flavor. It wasn’t the easiest recipe to through together since I added the steaming step, but worth it.

And I’m glad Friday is almost here, I kind of had the blahs today at work looking at the nice weather and thinking of what else I could be doing outside. Then I was a little tired and cranky when I got home, thankfully a long sweat session in the gym to a new play list took care of that.