Cauliflower Dessert

We had a bit of a surplus of cauliflower in the fridge, so my housemate challenged me to use this to make a dessert. I thought I'd play it safe and make a kind of rice pudding where the rice is cauliflower (so cauliflower pudding I guess). This is a pretty simple recipe, the experimental part is the idea. To be fair other people have tried this before on the internet although the stuff I read was more about it being vegan and low GI than being something nice or worth making for its own sake.

First I riced the cauliflower (well chopped it up as small as I could be bothered). I used about half of one.

The plan was to mix this with coconut milk and serve with golden syrup. Here are these ingredients decoratively arranged.

This was put in a pan for a medium heat for what was meant to be around half an hour. After about half this time this had resulted in something that tasted like bits of cauliflower floating in coconut milk. To correct this I upped the heat a little to try to thicken it up a bit and chucked in a cinnamon stick for flavour.

 This helped a little but it was still a bit to thin so to thicken it up I blitzed it up (without electrocuting myself this time). This was then put back on the heat with the cinnamon (I'd removed this whilst blending).

 Finally after another few minutes on the heat, up to the point the bits of cauliflower stuck to the edge of the pan were burnt, I declared it ready. At this staged I placed it in a bowl and 'decoratively' drizzled golden syrup over it.

Not being one to keep all of a good thing to myself I presented a slightly smaller portion to my housemate, also arranged decoratively below.

Review

In short this the the best cauliflower dessert anyone who has tasted it has ever tried. Although to be fair it is also the worst. It turned out quite well actually and I like to think because of my on the fly corrections (that tasting as you go thing the chefs talk about on the TV seems a good idea).

I think I got the cinnamon in there for the right amount of time, although the final result wasn't a thick as I would have liked...adding a large proportion of cauliflower would correct this, but probably unbalance the tasted. An odd thing about this was that I couldn't taste the coconut, so by replacing this with something slightly thicker (cream/condensed milk?) it might be possible to get a better overall result, although that would need testing. 

The Return Returns (still with Marrow)

You may have noticed I only used some of the marrow in the last post. You'll be glad to know that it's back. Also back is the shredded chicken. The here aim was to make a very different meal with the same basic ingredients, I leave judging the success of that to you.

First dice some marrow, I took another third (don't worry I'm not writing up what happen to the final third... I'll leave that to your imagination.

 Next I prepared the chicken. I coated the chicken with cornflour and 'hot mango mint' sauce (this is great stuff if you find it anywhere I recommend it).

 Now back to the marrow, add chopped onion, garlic, chili, broccoli and cabbage in a pan with some water. Boil this until the veg softens.

 Whilst the marrow is boiling you can have some fun deepish fat frying up the chicken. I was aiming for both crispy and sticky at the same time, which was maybe a little adventurous but it came out pretty well (if in doubt leave it in until it starts browning)

 Once it is cooked fish the chicken out the pan and mop off the excess oil with some kitchen paper. I didn't use the brush here, it's just photo bombing here.

Now once the marrow is ready you can blend it to produce a soup. Note: don't try unplugging a blender when it has got loose screws and your hands are wet. You have been warned.

 Now you have two components ready to mix together. I put the soup in a bowl. Then I put the crispy chicken bits on top and finally garnished with some coriander.

Review

So I was happy with this. The soup worked well, I'd probably recommend it as the main way of using up loads of marrow if you get stuck in my situation. The crispy chicken was nice, but the frying killed off most of the mint mango sauce's flavour... I ended up adding a little extra to both the soup and the chicken, so it was probably a bit of a waste to use it to make a batter (it also burnt a little in the oil during the frying which wasn't ideal). The combination of the soup and chicken bits was good, I can see myself doing something similar again with a soup.

The Long Awaited Return (with Marrow)

So I got a marrow from my parents and that inspired me to do a bit of experimentation. Seeing as these marrows happen a little bit too often I this blog is meant to help me keep track of these 'experiments' it inspired a new entry here.

So regular readers may have worked out when I'm not sure what to make I make some kind of fajita. In this case a marrow fajita.
So chop up as much marrow as you can be bothered with, about a third of the one shown above in this case. Chuck in some onions and garlic (because that's what you do when a frying pan comes out). Heat this until the marrow starts going mushy.

Next (well as early as possible I guess) add some Chorizo, chili,tomato puree, tomato ketchup, coriander(fresh and ground), cumin, paprika and cocoa powder. 

Cook all that stuff together until your chicken is ready, btw you should have shoved some chicken thighs in the oven already.

Shred this chicken and stir it in with everything else (well as much chicken as you need) and mix in any salad leaves you can find (well I had coriander, I suspect I used a bit much here) before chucking this on a tortilla and wrapping up the fajita. I also added a handful of peas at some point (I made this meal a few days ago and forgot about the peas until i saw them in the pick but it helps with the magical 5 a day target I guess).

Now go for the arty shot by grilling the whole thing and then tearing it open and spilling out the inners a bit (OK I still haven't master the presentation bit).

Review

It turns out that tomato puree plus cooked marrow results in something fairly similar to chopped tomatoes when there's lots of flavourings about, so this tasted fairly normal. Slightly thicker texture than normal I guess and less tomatoey than using chopped tomatoes (obviously) though I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not. So my conclusion here is cooking marrow results in a fairly thick sauce that takes in flavours well, this could be used to good effect with enough thought.