Cauliflower Soup with Seared Sea Scallops

My friend Cherrie and I went to yet another cooking class this week. You'd think we'd get tired of doing this, but no. We went further afield than usual (about 1 1/2 hours away, to San Diego). Where there's a cooking school and cookware store called Great News. It's in Pacific Beach, about 2 miles from I-5. We drove south, stopping in Oceanside for lunch and to watch the wind and the waves, then shopped at a fabulous meat market called Tip Top Meats (that also has the glorious sausages, and tons of imported grocery items from Greece, Scandinavia, Germany - it's introduced as a German meat market). Spent 45 minutes wandering the aisles and buying some fresh sausages (those wonderful Nuremburger ones, like we had IN Nuremburg last month). Check this link to information about Tip Top Meats .

Then we went further south to Little Italy (very near downtown San Diego) and shopped at Mona Lisa, a very old-school kind of Italian delicatessen. Oh, the wonderful aromas from cheeses and salamis. An Italian friend of ours who lives in Fallbrook, says he does all of his Italian foodstuffs shopping at this market (and restaurant). Lots of Italian wine you don't find even in wine stores. Fresh vegetables too, including really large fennel bulbs and cardoons. A small gem of a store. I bought some pasta, some fresh Italian sausages (with cheese and their own herb mixture) and some herby olives.

The class, titled "Entertaining with Style," was taught by one of Cherrie's and my favorite teachers, Phillis Carey. She lives in San Diego, but commutes to Orange County to teach occasional classes, which is how we learned about her. She's very fun, witty, cute, and is a fantastic cook. An author of several cookbooks too. Phillis recognizes us now, we've been to so many of her classes. Great News is her favorite teaching venue, and I certainly can understand why: a gorgeous designer kitchen with a prep counter that must be 18 feet long, all granite. Lovely facility. We had time to shop before in their incredible store - it has more merchandise than nearly any cookware store I've ever been in, and at intermission. You get a 10% discount on purchased items if you attend a class.

So, this was the first course of our 4-course meal - soup, salad, entree [and sides] and dessert. It was a delicious evening, and contained recipes I will make. Maybe every one of them. So, on to soup. This is very, very simple to make, although it does require a few steps:

• create the soup (stock, cream, onion, cauliflower, garlic)
• blanche the leeks
• saute the scallops
• chop the chives

But, these are not hard, not a one of them. I'll be making this soup soon. My DH really likes scallops, although you undoubtedly could substitute shrimp. Or ham, Phillis suggested, instead of the scallop. I did learn a bit about a muscle attachment on a scallop - called the "foot." I am certain I've had scallops that still had this muscle (where the scallop itself attaches itself to its shell) still attached. It's very chewy, so Phillis showed us how to find it and remove it. You run your finger around the outside edge of the scallop until you find a slight nub - it will usually open to a small flap. That's it - and you use a sharp knife to remove it (and discard). Don't dig into the scallop flesh much - just remove the nub portion. Go for it:

Cauliflower Soup with Seared Sea Scallops
Recipe: Phillis Carey, author, cooking instructor
Servings: 6
3 tablespoons canola oil -- divided use
1 cup onion -- chopped
1 clove garlic -- minced
1 head cauliflower -- about 3 3/4 cups
1 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 1/2 cups whipping cream coarse sea salt to taste white pepper to taste
1 whole leek
6 whole sea scallops -- "foot" removed, patted dry
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 1/2 tablespoons chives -- minced
1. Heat 2 T. of oil in heavy, large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and saute about 4 minutes. Add minced garlic and continue cooking until onion is soft. Do not burn the garlic. Add cauliflower, broth and cream. Bring soup to a simmer. Reduce heat to low, partly cover it and simmer gently until cauliflower is tender, about 18 minutes. Puree soup in small batches in blender (don't overfill, or it will blow the lid off the blender), until smooth. Return soup to same saucepan, season with salt and pepper. Can be made one day ahead to this point. Cover and chill. Rewarm before serving.
2. Cut and thoroughly wash the leek, discarding all but the white and just a little bit of the green. Cut leek into 1/8 inch slices. Blanch the leek in a small saucepan of boiling water, about one minute. Drain. Place a small mound of leek in each wide, flattish soup bowl (not white, preferably). The scallop will sit on top of this mound.
3. Heat remaining 1 T. of oil in a medium, nonstick skillet over high heat. Sprinkle scallops with salt, pepper and lemon zest. Sear until brown and JUST opaque in the center, about 1 1/2 minutes per side. Immediately place the scallop on top of the leek mound and ladle the hot soup AROUND the scallop (not on). Sprinkle the soup with chives and serve.
NOTES : If you don't know how to find the "foot" on the scallop, feel around the outside edge until you find a little bump or edge that sticks out (this is the part that attaches to the shell). It's a firmer kind of muscle meat and should be removed. Use a knife to cut it and discard.
Per Serving (excluding unknown items): 306 Calories; 30g Fat (82.2% calories from fat); 7g Protein; 8g Carbohydrate; 1g Dietary Fiber; 85mg Cholesterol; 57mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1/2 Lean Meat; 1 Vegetable; 0 Fruit; 0 Non-Fat Milk; 6 Fat.

To print a PDF recipe, click title at top.

Twice Baked Cauliflower Take 2

Improvise. That's the word of the day. I had a head of cauliflower and hadn't decided what I'd do with it. Remembering how wonderful the twice-baked cauliflower is that I posted a few months ago, I looked at the list of ingredients and didn't have everything. When I made it months ago I'd adapted it from the recipe over at Kalyn's Kitchen. This time I had about 1/3 cup of sour cream, but no Parmesan. I had about 2 ounces of cream cheese, but no green onions. So, I improvized. The mother of invention, so they say.

This is the dish that is kind of like mashed potatoes, but it's made with cauliflower. You mash it up, kind of like you would with mashed potatoes, but it's not as smooth. Then you add in the fixins, like bacon, sour cream, etc. What I did have was: bacon, a tad of cream cheese, a bit of butter, and buttermilk (I often add buttermilk to my mashed potatoes, so my thinking went along that this would be a good addition to cauliflower too). So, here's an adjunct recipe for twice-baked cauliflower. You can use whatever cheese you have - I happened to have a nutty, but mild white cheese with truffles in it. I hadn't planned on cooking with this cheese, but it was beginning to grow some mold on the outside, so figured I'd best use it pronto. It was delicious. We had seconds it was so good.

Twice-Baked Cauliflower Take 2

1 whole cauliflower, cut into large florets

3 slices bacon, thick-cut, minced

4 ounces cheese, your choice, shredded, divided use

1/3 cup sour cream

2 ounces cream cheese

3 tablespoons buttermilk

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the cauliflower. Cook until the cauliflower is just tender when you poke the stem with a knife. Drain and set aside.

2. Meanwhile, fry the bacon until brown. Drain on paper towels and set aside.

3. Mash the cauliflower until it's relatively smooth, but will still have small pieces visible. Save some cheese to put on the top. Add all the other ingredients and stir until combined. Pour into a small casserole dish and top with remaining cheese. (This can be eaten at this point, but it's best if you bake it for just a few minutes, or pop it in the microwave to heat it up completely.)

Per Serving (excluding unknown items): 515 Calories; 46g Fat (78.5% calories from fat); 16g Protein; 12g Carbohydrate; 3g Dietary Fiber; 114mg Cholesterol; 590mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1 1/2 Lean Meat; 1 Vegetable; 1/2 Non-Fat Milk; 8 Fat.

To view a PDF recipe, click title at top.

Kalyn's Twice Baked Cauliflower

I'm a fan of Kalyn Denny, a fellow food blogger of the highest order. I've mentioned her before, over at Kalyn's Kitchen, and her success with the South Beach Diet. So this was a recipe posted some months back, and since I'd tried another of her cauliflower recipes, the one with bacon and mushrooms, I was sure this one would be a winner too. She got it from The Low Carb Gourmet by Karen Barnaby.

The first time I made this I thought my DH was going to lick the baking dish. He thought it was that good. So last night, with me in a wheelchair in a cast with my fractured foot, and a cauliflower in the refrigerator, I suggested he could make this. It was a simple meal otherwise - citrus salt rubbed grilled pork chops, green salad and the cauliflower.

Well, let's just say the whole meal was a challenge for him. He's never been much of a cook. Put him behind a barbecue and he's king. And in front of the sink with a heap of dirty dishes, and he's a master. But put him in front of a recipe with a head of cauliflower, and he becomes frozen in place. He invited a friend, Bob, to come over and join us. His wife is out of town. Now Bob admitted he's not much of a cook, either, but he admirably made the green salad. I cut up the cauliflower, leaving tatters of it on the floor all around the wheelchair. But Dave was required to put together the rest of the vegetable dish. And you need to know that Dave didn't start the dinner until the doorbell rang.

Normally I wouldn't go into such detail about this, but I can only laugh about it. We didn't have any sour cream. I suggested plain yogurt, which we had. He forgot to add it. You're supposed to add the green onions to the cooked cauliflower. He put the green onions in with the raw cauliflower to boil/simmer, so it completely boiled off the flavor, I would assume. He couldn't find the cream cheese, so we used some of the Boursin herb cheese spread we had out as an appetizer. We had cheddar, so Dave grated that up with no problem. He couldn't find the Parmesan, even though I told him exactly what size plastic bag it was in the cheese drawer, so that was eliminated. And he'd completely cooked the cauliflower and added everything else before he remembered he had to prepare the bacon (in little frozen rolls in the freezer), chop it up and cook it crisp. Short 10-15 minute delay there. Where was I during most of this? My foot was aching, so I was laid out on the sofa 20 feet away with my leg elevated above my heart.

Dave reminded me of the phrase - a one-armed paperhanger. He kept saying the instructions weren't there on the recipe. He read it clear through - aloud I might add, but he was distracted, making conversation with our guest, trying to juggle getting things out of the refrigerator, thinking about setting the table outside, firing up the barbecue, getting the chops on the grill, me working the temperature probe, then him not overcooking the chops, keeping the temp in the barbecue at the right level, washing dishes in between (which he'd much rather do than cook), talking some more, with me piping in advice all the way through. (Welcome to the everyday world of cooking, my darling.) He got very frustrated - at me for giving him advice - and more likely at himself.

All I can do is laugh. He said, as we were finishing our meal (which was delicious, and Bob said the cauliflower was to die for), that he has a whole new appreciation for what it takes to cook even a simple meal! (YES!!!) This cauliflower dish is NOT hard to make. I assure you, it isn't. It just sounds like it from my description of my DH preparing it. He might beg to differ with me about that, but if you're even a basic cook, this will not throw you. And what it tastes like is those fabulous mounds of baked potato with all the trimmings. The bacon makes it, in my book, but you can reduce how much you use (recipe below shows less bacon than Kalyn's version). So, once again, thank you Kalyn.

Twice Baked Cauliflower
Recipe: adapted from one at Kalyn's Kitchen, a food blog, originally from The Low Carb Gourmet by Karen Barnaby
Servings: 4
1 head cauliflower
2 ounces lowfat cream cheese, or Boursin herb cheese
1 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup lowfat sour cream
1/4 cup minced green onions
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese -- grated
2 slices bacon -- cooked and crumbled
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
Preheat oven to 350°. Cut out stem and core from cauliflower, and cut into small pieces. Cook in large pot of boiling water until cauliflower is tender, but not overly soft. Drain well and mash with potato masher, leaving some chunks. Mix in cream cheese, butter, sour cream, green onion, Parmesan, and 3/4 of the bacon. Spread evenly in an 8 X 8 inch glass casserole dish. Sprinkle with cheddar cheese and reserved bacon. Bake 20-30 minutes, or until hot and bubbly. Or heat in microwave for about 7-8 minutes, covered.
NOTES : Apparently this recipe came about from the South Beach Diet since it consists of a vegetable, fats, but no carbs. The original recipe called for double the amount of cream cheese, sour cream, onions, Parmesan and bacon. The only ingredients left as is are the cauliflower and the Cheddar cheese. This dish is very flexible - if you don't have every ingredient, just substitute. No sour cream? Use plain yogurt. No Parmesan? Use more cheddar. No green onions, cook up 1/2 cup of yellow onions, chopped. No cream cheese? Use Boursin herb cheese instead. Or leave it out.Per Serving: 239 Calories; 19g Fat (69.8% calories from fat); 13g Protein; 5g Carbohydrate; 1g Dietary Fiber; 55mg Cholesterol; 472mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1 1/2 Lean Meat; 1/2 Vegetable; 2 1/2 Fat; 0 Other Carbohydrates.To view a printable recipe, click on title at top.

The story of my blog, and then Cauliflower with Bacon & Mushrooms

Since today I'm posting a recipe that came from another blogger, I thought I'd explain a bit about how I got to doing this blog in the first place. Sometime last Fall I read an article in a magazine that listed the URL addresses for about 4-5 food blogs. I'd never heard of a blog before that. I took a look at them and found I was reading their entire blogs, sometimes years in the past. I was fascinated. Mesmerized. Greedy for more. Hooked on more and more blogs. Nearly every food blog has a list of other food blogs that those bloggers read (sometimes called a "blog roll"), and I quickly began looking at all of those too. Then I heard about Google Reader and decided to give that a try. Once you have a Google account you access the Reader and as you find blogs you want to read (the blogs have an RSS feed, it's called) you simply add them to a subscription within Google Reader. Then I added the Google Reader to my Favorites so it's only two clicks away and I now have a list of all the blogs I frequent. I don't have to go to each individual blog site. New postings show up within Reader when they've been updated. They're viewable in a shortened version, usually, and if I want to see the full read, then I click on to see the actual website itself. Otherwise, I read the blog from the Reader.

As I read the stories other people wrote, I was intrigued, but kept talking myself out of being a blogger. It looked like it would take too much time. Writing stories every day??? How could I fit that into my busy schedule? And doing photos all the time? Whoa! Yes, I have a digital camera, but I don't have photos of most of my recipe collection (which now numbers over 400). Most of the bloggers use a free blog service (like this one at blogspot, another is typepad). The only limitation is whatever the provider allows in html conversion. I know nothing-zippo-nada about writing computer language (htm and html) which is actually how these stories get into the ether so you can view it. I type into a limited word processing kind of window, and I can add photos and links, make something bold or italic, but that's about all I can do. My words and photos get converted into html and somehow, magically, when I click the button called "publish" it appears on the website. One of my watercolors graces the top of the blog, and I can add elements, they are called, like my list of books I'm reading. Then I created a place on FileDen, which is a file repository web site for my recipes in pdf format. Anybody can upload files to FileDen (free), so I output the recipe from within my MasterCook recipe program (more on that on another post) and print it to a pdf file, then upload it to Fileden. The link is available, so I paste that into the blogspot cell and when you click on the recipe title, you get my pdf file from my recipe collection.

So six months have gone by since I began following the long list of bloggers I read, and suddenly one day I decided I wanted to do this too. I've always wanted to write, but never found a niche that was right for me. I don't have the creative bent to actually write fiction, but explaining cooking, or telling stories about our travels and food, etc. would be a cinch. I just hope I won't become too long winded and you folks out there get bored reading my stuff.

I'm working on perhaps having my own domain, not using one of these free blog services, but it may require more of a learning curve than I'm willing to do. I'm working on it. If I change, I'll post a message to that effect, but it won't be for awhile. I'm trying to learn Expression Web, the sequel to Front Page, to create my own complete web page. It's not easy for this old brain, but I'm trying.

Only one other thing: at the bottom of every post there is a little line that contains the date and time I posted it, but also there is a COMMENTS section. That's a place for you to add something. Any of you who would like to comment, I'd be very appreciative. Otherwise I have no clue whether my posts are even being read. I've subscribed to a free service (Feedburner) that is supposed to give me stats on my readers, but I don't believe it's working correctly. But I do know that several people have subscribed (oh, thank you!) and I hope to be worthy of your reading time.

So, now on to today's recipe. One of the early bloggers in bloggerdom, I suspect, is Kalyn's Kitchen. Kalyn Denny lives in Salt Lake City and is an avid advocate of the South Beach diet, which works for her. Her recipes are usually low on carbs, and she uses a lot of vegetables, which I like. I've been trying to incorporate more vegetables into our diet. We eat them every day anyway, but now I'm often making two vegetables and a protein with no carbs except those contained in the natural vegetables themselves. Since Dave is a Type 1 diabetic and has been for nearly 60 years (yes, really), he needs to watch carbs - at least count them carefully to calculate how much insulin to take at each meal - and it doesn't hurt me a bit to reduce carbs either.

Now don't get me wrong. I really, really like vegetables. But cauliflower wasn't up there on my yes-list at all. So, until this and one other recipe, cauliflower wasn't one of the vegetables I prepared very often. Steamed, plain cauliflower is not something I'd ever order. I eat it because I know I should, but not usually with much interest. So when I read Kalyn's recipe for the vegetable with bacon and mushrooms, I thought ah-ha. I like mushrooms. Bacon is something I like a lot too, and have found that even half of a slice of bacon can impart tons of flavor. I buy lean, thick sliced bacon without sulfates (Niman Ranch is probably the best, available at Trader Joe's and I also buy some from Whole Foods that's without additives). Normally I buy a package, use a slice or two, then roll up each remaining bacon slice and freeze them individually on a cookie sheet, then pile them into a Ziploc bag to pop back in the freezer. It takes no time at all to defrost a slice of bacon.

As I prepare this dish (I've made it innumerable times in the last 6 months) I have a very hard time keeping my fingers out of the pan. As the cauliflower begins to brown, I just have to test it often - you know - to find out if it's the correct texture of done-ness, right? This is best eaten just after making it. Although I have reheated it, it gets a bit soggy. So, try to make just enough for the one meal. I also have added garlic to this and enjoyed it too.

Cauliflower with Bacon & Mushrooms
Recipe: Kalyn's Kitchen (blog), but originally from "Vegetable Love"
Here's Kalyn's writeup: http://kalynskitchen.blogspot.com/2006/02/weekend-herb-blogging-20.html
Servings: 6

4 slices bacon, thick sliced, chopped (I usually use 2 slices)
1 small head cauliflower, cut into florets or bite-sized pieces
8 ounces mushrooms, halved, then cut into slices
1/2 red onion, diced
1/2 cup parsley, chopped (I use Italian)
Salt & pepper to taste

In a large sauté pan add the bacon and cook until quite crisp and remove to a paper towel to drain. Pour out most of the bacon grease, but do not wipe out the pan. Add the prepared cauliflower and mushrooms and cook over very high heat (important), stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes. Add the pre-chopped onions and cook about 2 more minutes, or until the vegies seem nearly done and are starting to brown a bit. This is when you need to test the cauliflower for tenderness, knowing you're going to cook it for another 2-3 minutes :) Add the bacon and parsley and continue to cook for 2-3 minutes more. Taste again - he-he - for tenderness . . . Add about 1/4 cup water, then scrape the pan to get any browned bits off and cook until the water has evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve piping hot.

To print just the recipe, click on the title at the top.