Recipe Experimenting

It’s been a lazy whatever Saturday here. I know, that sounds super exciting, right? But I kind of had a case of the blahs after an oddly busy week at work, off-and-on sinus fun, and helping a sick family member with flu/stomach virus symptoms while trying not to get sick myself. Still keeping my fingers crossed on that one. I woke up very early at 6am this morning and had some quiet time to catch up on office work, drink coffee, and cuddle sweet dogs. We also had a good workout at the gym and took three restless dogs for a long walk.

I have the chihuahuas on a short splitter leash now because they’ve mastered the art of wrapping up my legs with the longer leash and that doesn’t work while trying to navigate blind Skipper!

Shadow was a couch potato most of the day resting to run around the house all night again.

And I successfully ate through all our fresh foods and a lot of the pantry and freezer stash by not grocery shopping for a week and a half. My lunch salad was an interesting mix using the last bit of fresh produce – carrots, orange bell pepper, and fresh sprouts dressed with leftover nacho hemp sauce from earlier this week.

It was actually a good combo, the creamy sauce added a nice flare to the veggies. But we headed to Whole Foods to re-stock later and spent a small fortune.

I don’t usually buy so much at Whole Foods because it can add up fast. But it’s fun once in awhile and there were a lot of tempting sales like Garden of Life’s Raw Protein for $20. And the produce department is just fun for finding unique items to try like exotic mushrooms and fresh spices. I did grab a beautiful organic head of cauliflower and decided to try it with this recipe for Buffalo Style Cauliflower from The Cooking Channel’s How to Live to 100. I almost changed my mind after reading through the recipe because it’s pretty labor intensive and not something I’d try on a week night. I had to improvise a few ingredients, like flour and cornstarch for arrowroot and hemp seeds for cashews in the dipping sauce since I didn’t have everything on the ingredient list.

I’ve been enjoying that show a lot for great recipe inspiration, but I’m not sure I’d call this recipe a health recipe because of the amount of oil, flour, and cashews in it. The dill dipping sauce calls for a 1/4 cup of olive oil in addition to 1 1/4 cups of soaked cashews – yikes! But I get what it’s going for making vegetables the staring role in comfort dishes. I modified the sauce recipe to use a cup of shelled hemp seeds in place of the cashews and 1/4 cup of water in place of the olive oil and it still came out great. The actual preparation of the cauliflower “wings” was the bulk of the work dunking the cauliflower in a mixture of flour and nut/seed milk, roasting them in the oven while making a wing sauce stove top, tossing the cauliflower with the wing sauce and putting back in the oven to roast a little longer – whew!

But it was a fun and interesting experiment and the cauliflower does look a lot like wings with a red coating and has a nice spice.

The dill dipping sauce tastes a lot like a dilly blue cheese sauce and was great, I didn’t miss the extra oil at all because it was very creamy and rich. The cauliflower had a nice level of spice, but I wasn’t overly impressed with the texture of the breading. I think this recipe could be a lot simpler and healthier while still being great by making the dipping sauce as I did with hemp seeds and water instead of soaked cashews and olive oil and skipping the flour breading part all together, just roast lightly steamed cauliflower that’s been coated in the spicy wing sauce to crisp up the outside a bit and yum.

And it has the potential to be a great Superbowl party food.