nachos

Buffalo Cauliflower Nachos

I had a craving for nachos that I managed to turn into a bonafide vegetarian recipe. (Just reminding everyone out there that you don’t need to be a vegetarian to enjoy a vegetarian meal.) Break out of your comfort zone and try this one…

First we are going to make the buffalo cauliflower. I’ve chopped up a half a head of cauliflower into smaller than bite-size pieces. In the big bowl I have flour, corn starch, water, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, and garlic powder. Now it’s just a matter of combining the two!

These will go in the oven for about 20 minutes to cook through. Point of self-criticism: make sure there is enough physical separation between each cauliflower piece because some of mine stuck together when the batter pooled. (See bottom right corner.)

When they come out of the oven, take a basting brush and coat one side with buffalo (or some other) hot sauce. I missed taking a picture when I took them out of the oven 😦

Next we are going to prepare our other nacho ingredients.

In this pic I have tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, lettuce, zucchini, celery, jalapenos, lime, cilantro, and avocado. (Not shown: red onion, sour cream, and mozzarella.)

We are going to take our peppers, celery, and red onion and give those a quick fry on the stove top. This will be one of our nacho toppings.

Now you can start building your nachos on your baking sheet. I like to line my sheet pans with either parchment paper, or a silicone baking mat. It makes for easy clean up!

On top of our nachos, we will add our fried pepper mixture, shredded mozzarella, fresh sliced jalapenos, and the buffalo cauliflower. Pop that in the oven for ~10 minutes until your cheese is just starting to brown on the outer edges of your pan.

While my nachos were in the oven, I whipped together a quick guacamole and some sour cream and lime crema.

Here is the finished product. I served the nachos in the pan (mostly for lazy purposes), and topped it off with chopped lettuce, zucchini, and tomato, the guac, a few slices of lime, and a good helping of my crema. It was really tasty and you almost couldn’t tell you were eating cauliflower on your nachos. Also the cauliflower turned out super spicy, which should mean a lot coming from me because I love spicy food.

I hope you try something new and adventurous in your home food projects! As I always say (for the past 5-ish weeks), we have nothing but time…

LOCKDOWN LUAU

I wanted to do something special for dinner, without causing too much of a mess in the kitchen. I had a pork roast already, so I decided to make BBQ pork and pineapple skewers on the barbeque.

The sometimes unfortunate side effect of not being able to grocery shop whenever I want to leads to many kitchen substitutions. For example, having to fish out the chunks of pineapple out of the bag of frozen fruit medley. Something I always have on hand are those little plastic lemon and lime juice balls that they sell right next to the fresh guys in the produce aisle; a decent substitution and I endorse them fully.

To go with the skewers, I decided to make some nacho chips out of my old tortillas as well as a salsa fresca with some red onion scraps, my lime juice, the rest of my one jalapeno, and my cilantro of questionable freshness.

Once the pineapple was thawed out, I cubed up the pork and marinated the whole lot of it in cheapo BBQ sauce and some lime juice from my squeezy bottle. Simple and easy.

So in the end I had more pork than pineapple (see left-most meat sticks). I half-cooked my skewers in the oven first. I find the pineapple can burn at unequal rates to the pork (due to the sugar content of fruit), so by doing the majority of the cooking process in the oven it will ensure you have appropriate BBQ grill marks rather than something that looks like Mt. Vesuvius.

I cut my tortillas into strips rather than the traditional triangle shape to be different. I’m using the cheapest vegetable oil (in the largest integer) that I can buy. I have never known any difference across brands/price points. Also, if you aren’t a regular fryer, try a few test tortillas first to make sure your oil temp is correct. Start at medium heat and let the oil warm up for probably five minutes (or longer, depending on stove types and age etc.).

As soon as they are out of the oil, hit your chips right away with your seasoning. I have used a habanero lime grinder mix that I got at Winners Homesense when we still had civil liberties like casual shopping.

Here are the skewers after being finished on the BBQ. Once they come out of the oven, I re-doused them in more BBQ sauce since the baking will likely result in moisture loss.

And here is what’s left of the chips and the salsa. I can’t take credit for the tomatillo sauce (green goop) as that is store bought. Still tasty though!