Recipe of the Month: Homemade Cauliflower Rice

My Recipe of the Month posts started out as a 2013 New Year's resolution. In the interest of getting more fruits and veggies in my diet, I resolved to try a new fruit or vegetable each month. Over the years, that goal morphed into a more general one of trying new veggie-focused recipes on a monthly basis. And in recent years, that's often meant recipes that used plants as a substitute for animal products — like Soy Curls for sausage, oyster mushrooms for steak, or tofu for mozzarella cheese.

But in the past month, we've found ourselves having to eat quite differently. Vegetables are still essential, but now we're using them more often to take the place of starchy foods rather than protein-rich meat or dairy. In place of pasta, we've tried kelp noodles and heart of palm lasagna (both of which sort of worked, but are much too pricey to use on a regular basis). Brian also attempted a cauliflower crust pizza, which was another limited success; there was nothing wrong with the taste, but the crust lacked crispness and fell apart if you tried to pick up a slice in your hands. And this week, he decided to tackle one of the trendiest of all starch substitutes, cauliflower rice.

With all the folks out there these days on low-carb diets (most of them by choice, not dragged kicking and screaming like me), low-carb versions of everything are in high demand. Consequently, cauliflower rice — which is simply cauliflower cut up into small enough pieces that it resembles rice — has become easy to find ready-made in stores. You can go into Walmart right now and pull a 7-ounce bag of it out of the freezer case for about $2.50. But between the plastic packaging and the $5.60-per-pound price tag, it's not exactly an ecofrugal option. Instead, Brian picked up a whole head of cauliflower (about a pound) for $3.27 at Lidl, grated it coarsely, and lightly pan-fried it with a touch of salt. (The instructions he found online actually called for it to be cooked in a covered pan, so that the cauliflower rice would be more steamed than fried, but he didn't bother with that.)

He served this homemade cauliflower rice as an accompaniment to a Moroccan chicken stew. We normally dish this up over regular rice, quinoa, or couscous, but since the stew contains chick peas, eating more than a third of a cup of any of these as an accompaniment to it would put me over my carb allotment. Spooning the stew over cauliflower rice instead worked on one level: the mild flavor of the cauliflower blended into the background and didn't clash with the flavors of chicken, onions, chick peas, parsley, and cinnamon. But it didn't really add anything, either. Unlike real rice, the cauliflower substitute didn't soak up the gravy, stretching the stew across a bigger volume of food. The added vegetable matter was effectively just another ingredient in the stew, one that increased its bulk a little but added nothing to either its flavor or its substance. (Fortunately, Brian had also made a pot of quinoa, so I was able to add my allotted third of a cup of that to my bowl of stew as well.)

Although the homemade cauliflower rice wasn't ideal as an accompaniment to this stew, I still think it could be useful for other applications. It might work well with stir-fry or fried rice, either on its own or as a way to eke out regular rice and make a single portion go further. It wouldn't add any real substance to an all-vegetable meal, but these days we always include bulk up our stir-fries with tofu or Soy Curls anyway. So the cauliflower rice would simply make the meal feel heartier, even if it didn't actually make it any more filling. Or at least, that's the theory. At any rate, it can't hurt to try.