My birthday was this month, and due to the awfulness of Covid-19 I stayed home and celebrated alone. It was a pretty big bummer, especially for such a milestone year. But in an effort to not be so down about it, I decided to make myself a nice dinner. Step one was looking up "best side dishes with steak recipes."
This is the first of the two new recipes I picked: asiago mashed cauliflower. Super simple--made even easier by cutting out the "use a food processor" step, since I don't have one--and absolutely tasty in the end. The leftovers were good both warm and cold, by the way.
Ingredients:
- One head of raw cauliflower
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 4 oz. cream cheese (I actually used 1/3 reduced fat Philadelphia Neufchâtel cheese.)
- 1/2 cup asiago cheese, shredded
- 2 Tbsp. butter
- 1/4 tsp black pepper (or more if to your taste)
- 1/2 tsp salt (or more if to your taste)
- Optional parsley, or whatever
[The original recipe called for parsley, but I didn't have any. And while I didn't miss that in the final product, I did throw in a few dashes of Penzey's Roasted Garlic. It was a great addition, but I wouldn't recommend regular or raw garlic, as that might overpower the cheesy-ness.]
Directions:
- Clean and rinse cauliflower
- Chop into smaller pieces, cutting out any really thick stalk bits (I probably had 6 to 8 big-ish chunks. Nothing smaller than 1.5 inches for sure)
- Place cauliflower and salt in large pan/pot and add water until it covers the veggies
- Bring to a boil and cook until very tender--12 to 15 minutes
- Drain and then cool slightly
- Add cream cheese, asiago, butter, pepper, salt, and whatever other optional herbs/spices you want to add
- Mash and stir everything all together. I used a big whisk and that worked great!
