C is for Cheesy Cauliflower Bread Sticks

When you scroll through the "Everything" board on Pinterest, you'll notice several prevailing trends among the pins. Lots and lots of uses for pallets, for example. They make furniture out of them. They hang them on the wall. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. I am realistic enough to know there ain't no way I'm going to pin, let alone DIY, anything involving a pallet. If you read past the posted picture (and so many of them are projects done by professionals and not DIY friendly AT ALL), you'll find that many of the projects require complete dismantling of the pallet. 

Then there are food trends. Low carb diets are not the fad they used to be, but there are still plenty of pinned low carb recipes on Pinterest. Paleo recipes have been the rage in recent years (interestingly enough, not one of those recipes is for catching and eating grubs, rodents, or insects, which is what Paleo man ATE). Gluten-free recipes are also ultra trendy.

I recently pinned a recipe that is so hip that it actually embraces low carb, Paleo AND gluten-free. Can a recipe BE any trendier than that?! I actually pinned it because I thought that it might be a good way to get a vegetable down everyone in my house that wasn't green beans, potatoes or corn and NOT because I believe in these current eating fads.

Here is the recipe I pinned. There are dozens of nearly identical ones on Pinterest.

http://whatsfordinner-momwhatsfordinner.blogspot.com/2012/06/cheesy-garlic-cauliflower-bread-sticks.html

I ran into a grocery store to pick up a cauliflower and was horrified to find they charged $4.59 for them. I usually buy them at Aldi and never pay more than about $1.79 for one there, and usually, they are much less. As I had nothing else up my sleeve for today's A to Z entry, though, I had to bite the bullet and buy it anyway.

Back home, I got out the first of 19, yes, NINETEEN, pans, bowls and utensils that it took to make this dish. I seriously counted them as I cleaned up afterwards. The first step was to steam the cauliflower. Next was to mash the steamed cauliflower through a ricer.

Have you ever used a ricer? We have one, because my husband once read that mashed potatoes should ALWAYS be made with a ricer. I think he did it once and declared it not worth the trouble. The ricer has languished in the back of a drawer since then. And after ricing one gigantic, expensive cauliflower, I can tell you that I do not love ANYONE enough to rice a cauliflower again. I had bits of cauliflower EVERYWHERE. And the stemmy parts don't rice, so you have to scrape them off and discard them. Plus, a lot of water was squeezed out into the bowl along with the cauliflower, and nowhere in the recipe did it tell me what to do about that. The pictures from the recipe I was following didn't show riced cauliflower floating in water, so I drained the worst of it off and moved on. I had twice as much cauliflower as I needed for the recipe. Instead of saving the extra riced cauliflower, only to be thrown away at some future date after finding it shoved to the back of the refrigerator and kicking myself because I spent $4.59 on a stupid cauliflower and wasted half of it, I doubled the recipe, mixing the cauliflower with eggs, mozzarella and parmesan cheese, oregano and garlic.

I wanted to take a video of myself, but it took both hands
just to squeeze the cauliflower through the ricer.

The ricer (blade?) kept getting gummed up with stemmy
parts of the cauliflower

In theory, all the cauliflower squeezes through
the little holes and lands in the bowl. In reality,
it gets stuck in the holes and little bits of it fly
all over the kitchen when you're trying to scrape
it off the ricer.

The next step called for spreading olive oil in a baking pan, then lining it with parchment paper. Nowhere did it say what size pan, and the one I chose would have been twice as big as I needed, had I not decided to double the recipe. Then I had to spread the cauliflower mixture into the pan WITH MY HANDS. Wet, eggy, mushy cauliflower, then into a 450 degree oven for 15 minutes. Then another five minutes. And another five. And another five. Because after the 15 minutes called for in the recipe, it was still pale and watery. The pan finally came out of the oven and melted butter and garlic were spread over it, plus MORE mozzarella and parmesan cheese were added on top. I'm estimating a minimum of $5.00 worth of cheese went into this, and when added to the $4.59 for the cauliflower, these bread sticks were getting to be more than a little pricey. 

Finally, they were done, and I removed them from the pan and cut them with a pizza cutter and heated up some marinara sauce, as recommended. I forced coerced begged called my family in to the kitchen to try them.

Fresh out of the oven.

Cut into bread sticks. Mock bread sticks. Faux bread sticks.

This is how the jury voted:

My son: When it was just cheesy tasting, I got a little bit of a bread stick vibe. Then I started tasting cauliflower. Is it palatable? Yes. Do I want another one? No.

My husband: Assuming you hadn't had bread in a month and had this with marinara sauce and some pepperoni on top, then it would satisfy your pizza craving. Would I call it a bread stick? No.

My daughter: Too cheesy.

Me: Looks and feels and tastes like a giant cauliflower pancake.

What I learned: If you have to go to this much trouble just to get someone to eat cauliflower, then it isn't worth it. Nothing about this recipe is going to fool anyone into thinking they're eating bread sticks. Only an idiot pays $4.59 for a cauliflower.

I'm going to have to call this one a Pinterest fail.