Thursday I made Cauliflower Cheese Pie from The Moosewood
Cookbook. Have you come across Moosewood and its companion The Enchanted Broccoli Forest? Mine are the 1990s revised editions
with – so the recipes keep telling me, less cheese and fewer eggs than the
originals. But they’re solidly seventies – just look at these pages,
handwritten and illustrated by the author, Mollie Katzen!
There is a touch of
seventies worthiness here, and occasionally it veers a little bit too close to
nut roast, but generally these are a winner for a new vegetarian. There are
foods that spring from cuisines all over the world, good explanations of how to
do things (diagrams sometimes!) and plenty of suggestions for variations. I
always find the American way of measuring in cups and sticks of butter and
Fahrenheit temperatures a little frustrating, but you get used to it.
So, Cauliflower Cheese Pie. My eyes bumped on the title of
the recipe as I flicked through the book. I imagined a pastry case containing
cauliflower cheese – you know, boiled cauliflower, cheese sauce, grilled in the
oven and for us mostly served next to a baked potato. Bit odd. But that isn’t
what the recipe involved at all. The pie crust (I’d call it a tart because the
crust is on the bottom only) is made of grated raw potato and onion. This is
pressed into the pie dish, baked in the oven for forty minutes, then you brush
it with oil and bake for another ten. Think rรถsti.
You fry onion and herbs, put in small cauliflower florets
and cook with a lid on until the cauliflower is done. Then you put a layer of
cheese in the crust, followed by the cauliflower mixture and then more cheese
and some beaten egg – not as much as you’d use in a quiche, just enough to hold
the pie together. Bake again and – well look!
It was delicious and surprising. The cheese and the
cauliflower plain, creamy; the potato crust crispy at the edges, melt-in the
mouth elsewhere. It’s not a perfect dish. To our tastebuds it needed something
to lift the flavour a little. I thought some English mustard powder in the
cauliflower mixture, or perhaps some horseradish in the potato. But the thing
is, the reason I’ve picked it out of all the other things we had to eat last
week is that cooking it, eating it brought home the benefits of this whole
notion of trying to shake up the things we eat. It does require effort to look
up new recipes and be imaginative with the things we usually eat. But when you
come across a new idea like this, or two here – a new type of crust and a way
to eat cauliflower apart from ordinary cauliflower cheese or putting it in a
curry – it seems to me to be so worth that extra effort.
So hurray for Mollie Katzen! Those books have been on my
shelves for a long, long time and they have more than earned their place.
Although I cannot ever, ever agree that carob is a reasonable substitute for
chocolate (sorry, Mollie).
Happy eating!
Here's the entire menu for week 4.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
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