Something that is plentiful right now is cauliflower.  My major cooking project for the weekend was to see if I could turn a $5 head of cauliflower into rice using The Minimalist Baker’s how to guide.

It was a project that ended up being a little more complicated and messy than it looked on the blog post.. A recurring theme in my attempts to faithfully reproduce what I see on the home pages of the arty food blogs.  My food processor had to be unearthed from the depths of the pantry, given a quick clean and then put together again.  Then the cauliflower had to be trimmed and stray bits of it had to be swept off the floorboards and the benchtop.

We were finally ready to blitz the trimmed cauliflower quarters into rice.  Preschooler SSG was on hand to be chief button presser.  I think I overloaded my processor, half a cauliflower at a time would probably be more efficiently processed.  Half my cauliflower got over processed and ended up looking like mashed potato.

I was getting a bit nervous at this point.  Not just because Preschooler SSG was being so enthusiastic with his thumping of the cauliflower but because of that other time I tried to be healthily creative with a vegetable (sweet potato toast using  my toaster).

And then the resulting ‘rice like grains of raw cauliflower’ had to be blotted dry with kitchen towel.  I also put mine in the fridge afterwards for a few hour to get rid of as much moisture as I could.

The cauliflower prepped for dinner, it was time for lunch.  Which featured soup made from the vast collection of Oliver family recipes I found on Jamie’s website with a side of thickly buttered plasticky white bread with hidden fibre and an extremely long fridge life.

Followed by an afternoon of keeping a slightly sick Preschooler SSG in good spirits with an assortment of indoor activities.  Including a round of ‘what can you sell mummy for lunch?’.  Which saw me walk away with all this wooden food for the princely sum of one play money tenner.

Dinner time rolled around soon after and I got cracking on the cauliflower rice.  It takes about 5 minutes to wok fry in a little oil.  I sauteed some garlic before adding the cauliflower and seasoned with a little soy and pepper at the end.  There are recipes where you can just bake your cauliflower rice but this takes around half an hour and considerably more oil.

As you can see, my cauli rice ended up looking like mashed potato.  I’ve always loved the taste of baked or roasted cauliflower so I was able to overlook the cosmetics.  All that preparation with the blotting and refrigeration ensured I didn’t end up with soggy rice but I’m still a rice girl at heart.

Have you made cauliflower rice before?  What have you eaten it with?