Hello friends!
Today I want to tell you about one of my favorite soups. It’s not my recipe, but it’s
a “genius” one that has stayed in my cooking rotation because it is so beautifully simple (and delicious), it’s a work of art in the form of a recipe.
The soup sounds totally boring - just onion, cauliflower, salt, olive oil, and water. (OK, so technically 5 ingredients, but 3 I’m assuming you always have on hand!) You cook the onion in olive oil, then add cauliflower and water, then some more water, more cooking, blend, and that’s it! Sounds like there’s no way this could be delicious but you’ve gotta trust me, and gotta try it to believe it!!
There’s an important intuitive cooking lesson in this soup, which is mainly what I want to talk about today.
If you want to cook more intuitively, with more ease, flexibility, and flow (and less reliance on recipes), one of the key shifts you might start to make is to begin
buying what looks good and
then figuring out what to make from it using a short list of recipes or
formats you love and are confident in cooking.
Now - when I say “buy what looks good” I’m still talking about buying ingredients you’re comfortable and familiar with. If you always buy similar ingredients, one way to increase variety and interest in your cooking is to expand what you do with those favorite ingredients so that you have more options in your back pocket. Some deeper knowledge and observations about the characteristics of your key ingredients will help you expand your options for cooking with them. Let me explain with today’s example: cauliflower!
Vegetables come from nature - duh - and they all have distinct culinary characteristics - it’s so cool! Now - you might be able to intuitively guess this because of the plethora of trendy cauliflower food items on the market today - but I’m here to tell you that
among veggies, cauliflower is truly one of the most versatile and special ingredients. Why?! I would say it’s unique because of its somewhat magical chameleon-like textural abilities. It can hold its shape well, OR break down. It can be crispy when roasted, OR totally silky and creamy when blended into something (like
the soup). Its white color allows it to blend in OR stand out and it can easily pretend to be bread-like or crust-like or rice-like // all of the above!
It seems to have simultaneous heft and lightness all in one! It can be the star of the show, or play a clutch supporting role in a meal. As such, it is one of my favorite veggies, and I buy it often because there are SO MANY THINGS you can do with cauliflower.
And of course, one of my favorite food features - it lasts a WHILE in the fridge. Most recently I purchased two heads of cauliflower on Sunday, January 17. I didn’t eat the second one until this past Wednesday, the 27th. That’s a full 1.5 weeks after purchase and it was totally, perfectly fresh and delicious. (Admittedly, it came wrapped in plastic, which - I must conclude after generally buying plastic-free cauliflower heads at the farmers market,
did seem to help in preserving the freshness. Although I hate plastic, it does have its functions.)
As for the ways I cook cauliflower, most often it's:
- roasted
- cut small and sautéed, or
- added to a stew/curry
I also sometimes bake it in my
cauliflower “faux”-caccia. Admittedly I haven’t yet tried cauliflower steaks or whole-roasted cauliflower, but
these two recipes for them look pretty good!
When I’ve cooked cauliflower in my usual ways enough times to be a little bored, that’s when I usually remember the
genius cauliflower soup. And the other thing that reminds me to make this soup is the appearance of
romanesco at the farmers market. Romanesco is a special variety of cauliflower, photo below.
Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat?!?! I mean - you can’t deny that nature is just amazing when you look at these wacky, stunning shapes:
