RECIPE: Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes!

Posted by Ethne~

I made one of my favorite vegetable dishes tonight - cauliflower mashed potatoes. 
 

Remember from here where I talked about making baby food modeled after Jessica Seinfeld's book, Deceptively Delicious?  Well, I've made purees since then for all sorts of uses, like beets and sweet potatoes for pancakes; peas and spinach for smoothies; and homemade applesauce, skins and all.  My girls eat it all - they don't know the difference.

This smoothie was made from beets, berries, kefir (homemade yogurt) and OJ

beet puree

kefir

I mixed up this idea with a dish you can eat on Atkins/South Beach diets.  I did the South Beach diet before I got married and I have to say, it was great.  Besides pregnancy weight gain, I've never gained the weight back I lost on that diet.  Breastfeeding dropped my weight even further.  (ROCK THAT S**T!)  The dish: cauliflower mashed potatoes.  No potatoes are harmed in the making of this dish - it's all cauliflower!

I use the whole head of cauliflower

So I cut a cauliflower head up into florets and steamed it (it took three batches to steam it all - the Ziploc steamer bags and my food processor can only handle so much at a time).  The steamer bags cook the cauliflower florets perfectly in 4 minutes.

sweet steamin'

I dump the steamed florets directly into my food processor and whirred it up.  I stopped after 1 minute and scraped the sides down with a spatula.  The consistency was still slightly coarse (like grains of kosher salt) so I added a little (about 2 tablespoons) water and whirred it again for another minute.  This left me with a nice, mashed potato consistency.

Before water: see the coarse consistency at the top edge of the bowl?

after water: smooth just like mashed potatoes, huh?

I froze 2/3rds of the cauliflower plain (in 2 separate packages) for future use.  The third portion I used for dinner tonite.  To up the flavor, I added some butter, salt, milk (in place of the water, same amount), pepper and parmesan cheese.  I whirred it into the consistency of mashed potatoes and served it up.  Let me tell you it's DELICIOUS.

my plate: baked fish, brown rice with spinach and cauliflower mashed potatoes - NUMMY

The girls don't know they aren't eating real mashed potatoes and I feel totally WOMTASTIC feeding my kids a great cruciform vegetable - cauliflower is in the same family as broccoli which = cancer fighter!

KD posing

Easy Mac not so much into a fancy pose