Recipe of the Month: Roasted Cauliflower and Chick Peas (plus bonus dessert)

On the last Thursday in May, during our weekly grocery run to Lidl, Brian made an impulse purchase of a cheap cauliflower. Having bought it, he then had to figure out what to do with it. We'd already had aloo gobi recently, and he didn't have any leeks to make his roasted leek and cauliflower pasta. So he went hunting online for ideas and dug up a recipe at a site called Last Ingredient for a dish made from roasted cauliflower and chick peas, topped with an "herby tahini" spiked with fresh parsley, cilantro, garlic, green onion, and lemon juice. We had all of that except the cilantro, so he just substituted additional parsley, which the garden is producing plenty of, and left the rest of the recipe unchanged.  

This dish isn't at all complicated. All he had to do was divide the cauliflower into florets, toss them and the chick peas with olive oil and spices, spread them out on a baking sheet, and roast them for half an hour. While it was cooking, he whipped up the tahini sauce and a batch of quinoa to accompany the dish. (The recipe didn't call for this, but it noted that "Leftovers can be stirred into cooked pasta, quinoa, farro or barley," so Brian figured there was no need to wait for it to be left over.) 

He served the dish with the herbed tahini on the side, along with some extra parsley for sprinkling. I tried it first without the sauce and found it quite enjoyable on its own: with its blend of onion and garlic powder, cumin, smoked paprika, black pepper, and salt, it wasn't at all lacking in flavor. But when I added a dollop of the sauce, that extra punch of lemon, garlic, and sesame flavors livened it up still more. It didn't need a lot, just a little sprinkle in each bite to give it that extra brightness and piquancy.

In short, I expect this recipe to become a part of our regular rotation. So long as cauliflower remains cheap at Lidl, we can alternate back and forth between it and aloo gobi so we don't get tired of either one.

This was not the only new recipe Brian tried last week. Late in May, the New York Times climate column ran a story (gift link here) about a vegan chocolate cake that was so good, it convinced the author to go vegan herself. She'd long been concerned about the climate and the impact our food choices have on it, but she also couldn't see a life without animal foods as worth living. Tasting this "sumptuous" cake at a backyard wedding, she reports, opened her eyes to the idea that "plant-based eating could be delicious."

Of course, this did not come as news to Brian or me. We already had many delicious vegan recipes in our repertoire, including a pretty good chocolate cake. That recipe, known in my family as "wacky cake," depends on a vinegar-and-baking-soda reaction to leaven it with no need for eggs. It's incredibly simple to make; I first learned to do it at the age of 7 or 8. But Brian found the swooning description of the cake in the New York Times piece so intriguing that he decided he had to try it for himself. 

The recipe, from the site Nora Cooks, isn't particularly complicated. In fact, the ingredient list is pretty similar to our basic wacky cake, with the addition of a cup of soymilk and some applesauce. The main feature this recipe has that mine doesn't is a chocolate buttercream frosting to go with it. The recipe calls for vegan butter to make this frosting—specifically, the kind that comes in sticks rather than in a tub. Brian and I used to buy this kind of plant butter for pie crusts, but lately it's become harder to find in stores. So, rather than go hunting all over for plant butter in stick form, Brian decided to try using our homemade plant butter homemade plant butter in the frosting and see if that worked okay.

The answer turned out to be "sort of." The problem is, the oils it's made from (canola and coconut) have a significantly lower melting point than the palm oil used in the plant butter sticks. Brian had to put the cake layers into the freezer to keep the frosting from melting as he applied it, and the iced cake had to go immediately into the fridge and stay there to keep it from melting just in the warmth of the kitchen. When we wanted to share some slices with our friends at Morris dance practice, we had to pack them into a cooler to keep them from turning into puddles.

That bit of hassle aside, this was definitely a good chocolate cake, with a moist, rich texture and a strong chocolate flavor. But to be honest, it wasn't that much better than our usual wacky cake. It was mainly the rich frosting that made it feel much more lavish and decadent—almost too much so for my taste. I had to carefully manage the balance between cake and frosting as I ate to keep the sweetness from being overpowering.

So, while it was interesting to try this cake of legend, I honestly don't know that it lives up to the hype. Personally, I didn't find it that much better than the wacky-cake cupcakes with coconut frosting Brian made for my birthday ten years ago, and it certainly can't hold a candle to our wedding cake with its layers of chocolate and raspberry mousse. If we could figure out how to make that cake vegan, now, that would be a cake truly worth converting to a plant-based diet for. But this one, while good, is hardly a life-changing experience.