Recipe of the Month: Smoked Cauliflower Soup

This is going to be a very full weekend. Tomorrow I'm spending the entire afternoon with my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter, watching CCL's Fall Virtual Conference (which technically has already started, but tonight's session is just a "reception" that I don't consider important). On Sunday, we've got a role-playing game session scheduled in the afternoon, after which we'll just have time to grab some dinner before dashing off to a rehearsal for the Cotillion Singers—an ad hoc group that forms once a year and learns four or five pieces for a single performance at the Princeton Country Dancers Winter Cotillion. So tonight is about the only time I have free to dash off a quick blog entry about November's Recipe of the Month: the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from Everyday Happy Herbivore.

This is the fifth recipe we've tried from this cookbook, which we picked up at Half Price Books last Christmas, and all the others were varying degrees of lackluster. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was decidedly lacking in orange flavor, the Chickpea Tenders were dry and crumbly, and the low-sugar, high-fiber Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits and Apple Fritter Cups were both stodgy and insufficiently sweet. So I was feeling a bit disillusioned with the book, but I decided to give it one more try, this time with a simple recipe that looked like it could hardly go wrong. Then, if that one proved as disappointing as the others, I'd pass on the book to someone else.

The Smoked Cauliflower Soup recipe certainly looked straightforward enough. The first step is chopping up a whole cauliflower and boiling it until tender. While that's going, you whip up a soup base from a cup of nondairy milk (we used soy) seasoned with onion powder, garlic powder, Cajun seasoning, salt, paprika, and liquid smoke. Then you add the cooked cauliflower, blend it all together, and heat it through. 

It seemed pretty foolproof, and yet Brian was wary. Based on his knowledge and our previous experiences with this cookbook, he was convinced the amount of seasoning in the recipe was going to be woefully inadequate. So he doubled the liquid smoke from an eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter, tripled the Cajun seasoning from a half-teaspoon to a half-tablespoon, and bumped up the salt from a tiny dash to a robust teaspoon and a quarter. He also decided the meal needed more protein, so he supplemented the dish with some roasted chickpeas. These were even simpler than the soup itself: he just drained a can of chickpeas, tossed them with a half tablespoon of canola oil and a teaspoon of Cajun seasoning (to match the soup), and baked them at 450F for 20 minutes. 

Both these alterations turned out to be wise choices. The thick soup had a texture rather like Cream of Wheat, and without Brian's additional seasonings, it would probably have tasted pretty much like it too. Instead, it was reasonably flavorful, and sprinkling the chick peas on top gave it a bit of textural interest as well. In fact, I thought the chickpeas were by far the best part of the meal, and I saw the soup as little more than a vehicle for carrying them. Brian liked it better than I did, enough to take seconds at dinner and willingly polish off the leftovers for lunch the next day, but he didn't absolutely love it. All in all, we both agreed that while there was nothing wrong with the soup recipe, it wasn't nearly as interesting as most of the other things we do with cauliflower, such as his aloo gobi and the roasted cauliflower dish that was our Recipe of the Month for June. So while we both liked it all right, we don't see any compelling reason to make it again.

All in all, I'd give this dish a solid C, maybe a C plus. It's a passing grade, but I'm not sure it's a good enough one to bring up the cookbook's GPA to a reasonable level—particularly when you consider how much Brian had to amplify the seasoning in the recipe just to get it up to that passing score. So I can't decide if we should keep tinkering with the cookbook or give up on it. Maybe we should pick out just one more interesting-looking recipe, give that one a try, and let that be the deciding vote. If that dish is a keeper, so is the cookbook; if not, it's time to write the book off as a loss.