Mashed Cauliflower

 

It seems to me that the biggest obstacle most people face in a diet is food preparation.  There are lots of nice dishes on the ketogenic diet, but they have to be searched for, and shopping can also be more involved.  Then, fixing the nice dish almost always takes longer than prepared food.  

I decided to try a new twist on the mock mashed potato dish that substitutes, semi successfully, with cauliflower.  The biggest problem is that, while it's a nice recipe, it usually just tastes like cauliflower.  If you need to have the mashed potato craving go away, it may not happen.  

The new step was to put the cauliflower through a potato ricer after pureeing it.  I've never tried this with a potato, but I actually spent around $15 buying a potato ricer just for the mashed cauliflower recipe.  According to the video that recommended this, this technique would take mashed cauliflower to a whole new level, and be indistinguishable from regular mashed potatoes.  Why?  They claimed it removed the excessive cauliflower juice and that this juice was what gave the telltale taste of cauliflower.  

I bought a cauliflower.  I washed it, and decided to use my new knife to cut it....$79 on sale.  It is a great knife.  I carefully unboxed it when it arrived, and cut myself anyway.  If you look at it funny it will cut you.  It's my sharpest knife ever, and about the length of a chef's knife. I was thrilled that it cut through the cauliflower like butter.  It was way easier to get through this step than usual.  

I boiled the cauliflower, and gave half of it to Mom, buttered.  I tried to puree my half with the immersion blender, but in the future, should there be a future, I'll use a regular blender, since it didn't turn out puréed.  

And then....I put it through the potato ricer!!!  I don't know what I thought was going to happen.  What did happen was cauliflower juice gushing out of the cauliflower in a surprising volume.  Well, maybe half a cup.  I looked inside the ricer to see how my cauliflower was doing.  Well, there was a little paste on the bottom of the ricer.  I removed it with my hand and put it in a bowl.  There was about a half a cup of cauliflower left.  Hmmm.   That's not the way it looked on the video.  They had a big bowl of mock mashed potatoes that they suggested one put out for Thanksgiving, insisting that no one would ever know the difference. 

It was cold now, so I heated it in the microwave and put butter and salt and sour cream in it.  

It was tasty, and it did taste less like cauliflower.  It was disappointing that half a cauliflower resulted in only half a cup of finished product.  I looked at the time.  This took one hour of time from start to finish.  

So probably my biggest issue is how small the result of my efforts was.  It sure didn't look anything like the mashed cauliflower in this photo.    How many cauliflowers would it take to make a serving bowl of mashed cauliflower?  At least two.  Maybe four.  And they cost around $2.50 each.  That crazy endeavor would cost $5.00 to $10.00.  

So should there be a future, I'll probably go rogue and fix real mashed potatoes from Idahoan potato flakes next time.  They're yummy.