Hello and happy Sunday, friends! Sometimes the best gift for a short missive like this is just one focused, passionate recommendation. I have a good one for you today: a recipe that I think is just right for right now; a recipe that is so well-suited to this blustery March season, when it's sleeting one day and sunny the next. It's also the most perfect recipe for what feels like extra-busy times with piled-up projects and spring cleaning and all the other distractions that increase my appetite for make-ahead meals. This paragon of a recipe is Yotam Ottolenghi's ingenious Cauliflower Cake — a versatile marvel that is good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's been my saving grace over the past month.
This recipe manages to hit many notes of perfection: It's absolutely delicious (because a great recipe must be, of course). The concept of a savory cake might sound counterintuitive, but this one illustrates how wonderful they are, with the satisfaction you can only get through a big wedge of carbs, but sans sugar crash. The generously sized cake bakes up golden, slicing up into moist, savory, fragrant, and extremely more-ish slabs you can pick up with your fingers, (especially cold from the fridge) or eat warm off a pretty plate. The flavor starts with mild cauliflower, goes deep with sauteed red onions, and ends with a sunny flurry of fresh basil. Winter veg meets summer herbiness: the perfect dish for this in-between season. And it's vegetarian!
I call it ingenious because it takes a humble vegetable and blends it with the methods of easy quick breads and make-ahead cakes to create something quite new and delicious. You start by cutting up and boiling a cauliflower head until tender. (If cutting up a cauliflower sounds like too much work, an equivalently sized bag of frozen cauliflower florets also works.) Mix and mash with Parmesan cheese, herbs, eggs, and a little bit of flour, then bake until golden. I love Ottolenghi's eye for the dramatic and beautiful, too — honed, no doubt, by his years of running open-counter cafes in London. This cake is topped with purple rounds of red onion, the concentric circles making an otherwise plain slice pop with color and graphic interest.
I made this cake once last month for a brunch with vegetarian friends; it was a perfect star. Then it did more humble duty for me as a make-ahead breakfast-lunch-dinner while my scientist husband went on a two-week-long fieldwork trip to Alaska. At home alone with two kids, I leaned hard on this nourishing recipe for nearly a week. Oh yes, it keeps beautifully in the fridge.
A dish that can be the star for brunch and feed one through hectic days: that's truly the little black dress of recipes, and I recommend it to you as nourishment through whatever these final days of March throw at you.
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