Head’s up: 12 main-course cauliflower recipes from easy to ambitious
Cauliflower looks like the ghost of broccoli, or a human brain that has been drained of blood.As is the case with many overlooked vegetables, boiling is the absolutely second-worst way to cook it (we do not talk about cauliflower rice), while roasting is best, to coax out its sweet and nutty flavours.A whole head is very good and affordable in Australia at the moment and can easily feed a whole family.Marrying florets with warm spices and fragrant baked rice, Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe is finished with a drizzle of fresh lemon juice to keep the flavour fresh.Pick a purple cauliflower and the acid at the end will flush the florets bright pink.
You will need two baking dishes for this one, and enough foil to cover them,This is another double-tray recipe boosted with chickpeas and halloumi to make it a more substantial meal but note it serves three – or two for dinner, plus extra for tomorrow’s lunchbox,The recipe also calls for half a pomegranate which, aside from pairing well with roasted cauliflower, is in season in Australia,It’s straight to the pool room with these crunchy morsels,Alice Zaslavsky’s rissoles are a spin-off of her childhood’s Georgian kotletki, rolled in panko for a extra-crunchy coat.
You need only a quarter of a cauliflower for this recipe, and combining the higher-moisture florets and chicken mince – rather than chicken alone – results in juicier rissoles.While Zaslavsky picks panko, Miers prefers polenta as the crispy coat for these cauliflower steaks, which are flash-fried, roasted then served with an escabeche of floret offcuts – and not a cow in sight.There’s white food, then there’s literal white food: cauliflower baked in a sauce made of onion, cream, flour, white bread and cheese (OK, the cheese is yellow-ish).If you can’t find lancashire cheese, Cloake says any hard cheese will do, including cheddar, gruyere and red leicester.Yes, the cauliflower is boiled first, but that’s followed by frying in a good amount of butter, then grilling in cheese sauce until it’s golden and bubbling, like a hedonistic brassica volcano.
For a variation, Tom Hunt’s recipe uses a whole head, leaves and all; while turmeric, mustard powder and red leicester cheese colours the humble all-white veg a show-stopping orange.Why cook with one cauliflower when you could use up two? You’ll need a couple of big heads for this recipe – a whopping 1.6kg in total.Meera Sodha once regarded korma as “the curry for people who were scared of curries” until she was converted by a delicate rendition in a Brick Lane curry house.Her vegan recipe replicates korma’s creaminess without the dairy – choose the non-dairy milk of your choice, I imagine unsweetened soy would be good for a creamy mouthfeel.
Tony Tan’s recipe cleverly combines the sweet and smoky flavours of char siu, the Cantonese roast pork, with roasted vegetable.The method is simple: simmer the head, blitz the marinade, then smear it all over and pop it in the oven.Colour: an alluring burgundy.Whenever I’m in a what-to-cook rut I recall the chef Rupal Bhatikar’s formula for making a great Indian curry.Cloake’s take on the much-loved aloo gobi treads a similar path, though she fries the potato and cauliflower for extra brownie points – in other words Maillard reaction flavour – before frizzling the onions.
The recipe calls for waxy potatoes, low-starch, high-moisture taters that hold their shape during cooking,In Australia, dutch creams are your most affordable and widely available waxy spuds,Whenever I boil dried lentils I inevitably find myself shouting at the pot – will those evil lentils ever finish cooking? Reading Hayden’s ingredients list, I feel my body relax at “400g tin”, where it’s the legumes that are drained, not me,It’s quick! It’s easy! And it will make good lunch leftovers,Now we’re getting fancy, combining two cauli classics.
Take a whole roasted cauliflower, coat it in a mushroom and chestnut mixture, drape it in decorative butter puff pastry, and serve with a mustard-spiked cheese sauce,It’ll take you almost two and a half hours to complete this masterpiece, so bookmark it for weekends and special occasions,Another cauliflower, cheese and pastry combo, though Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe has more of a “fridge raid” nature than Ravinder Bhogal’s dish,With 150g cheddar, 100g butter and more than half a litre of milk, it leans heavily into wintertime comfort eating,After the pie has baked, make sure you leave plenty of rest time – at least 15 minutes – or you’ll blanch your mouth with its molten filling.
We can scrub cauliflower rice from culinary history but cauliflower risotto I will accept,Here, half the head is cut into florets and roasted; the other half is grated then sauteed with onions for the soffritto,As with all risotto, slow and steady is the key – Sophie Wyburd’s recipe stirs in the hot stock, one ladle at a time, over the course of 30 minutes,
Sir Hayden Phillips
Who do you send for when the mountain of flowers left by mourners at the gates of Kensington Palace for Diana, Princess of Wales threatens to catch fire from the heat of its decomposition? Or when you need to persuade a thousand senior Whitehall officials that they can no longer park on Horseguards? Or set up a National Lottery? Take action on Press Regulation? Find a compromise on party political funding? Or abolish the role of lord chancellor without rewiring the entire constitution?For more than 30 years, the answer to all these challenges and many more was to call for Hayden Phillips.The “mandarin’s mandarin”, one of the most influential Whitehall officials of his time, or “an oily Welshman” in the words of one disgruntled MP (Phillips was not Welsh), he was a byword in the corridors of power for his appetite for good living and the range of his contact book.When Margaret Thatcher wanted to find £50m from public funds to spend on the Thyssen art collection, Phillips – a Treasury official at the time – immediately called the director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, to ask what his priority purchase for the nation would be if he had £50m.According to Phillips’ memoir, armed with MacGregor’s advice, he advised Thatcher that the Thyssen collection was not value for money. In the event the government offered for the collection, but it eventually went to Madrid
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Downing Street pushed the Foreign Office to find a diplomatic role for Keir Starmer’s communications chief over the head of the then foreign secretary, the former head of the department has revealed.Testifying to MPs at parliament’s foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday, Olly Robbins said he had several conversations with No 10 about finding a role for Matthew Doyle, who was later suspended as a Labour peer after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children.Robbins said he had been asked not to mention the idea to David Lammy, who was foreign secretary at the time.Robbins described the conversations as part of more general pressure from people at the top of the government to place senior political figures in senior diplomatic posts. He made the revelation while testifying to the committee about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador
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Well, what would you do? You’re a top civil servant with more than 25 years of government service. You’ve worked for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. You went through Brexit hell as a lead negotiator. You were sacked by Boris Johnson and were then brought back by Keir Starmer.You land a plum job as permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office and do your boss a favour by appointing his man as ambassador to the US
Olly Robbins says he faced ‘constant pressure’ to get Mandelson in post
The sacked senior civil servant Oliver Robbins has said he was subject to “constant pressure” when he started working at the Foreign Office to get Peter Mandelson in post as soon as possible.He said the Cabinet Office urged the Foreign Office to allow Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US without the usual vetting process but the Foreign Office pushed back and the vetting eventually went ahead.In an extraordinary development, Robbins, who was sacked by Keir Starmer last week after the Guardian disclosed he had overturned a recommendation from UK Security Vetting (UKSV) to deny clearance for Mandelson, suggested he had done so without knowing the full extent of national security concerns over the Labour peer.The former permanent secretary made his decision to give clearance without seeing the UKSV form – which said there was a “high” overall concern and concluded “clearance denied” – or even knowing the details.Robbins also confirmed the Guardian’s story that senior government officials had considered whether to withhold from parliament sensitive documents about the vetting process, a story which was denied last week by the prime minister’s chief secretary, Darren Jones
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