Cauliflower and chicken - different approaches

This is one of those 'I've got to use up something so what am I going to make?' pieces with some other random thoughts about this and that as I go.

The real problem ingredient today is cauliflower. As usual I saw a bargain and bought it, and it's now probably past its best, and definitely needs using up. Of course, being cauliflower it will need using up over several days with different recipes, because there's only two of us and cauliflowers are large. One of the meals will be Ottolenghi's filo pie, but today I thought I would see what could be made with chicken. It's time we had some meat and I have lots of chicken.

I think this is the winning recipe - Creamy chicken and cauliflower - although I could still change my mind - which comes from a website called Damn Delicious but here is a little bit about how I got to that decision, and those few random thoughts along the way.

So let's begin with a random thought or two associated with the creator of this recipe - Chungah Rhee - a Korean American young lady. The recipe was actually the first one on my Google search results, so I decided I would check out the creator just a little. So there she is looking glam, with that chirpy message at the the bottom. With degrees graduate and post-graduate in Public Health - due to family expectations she suggests but over a long time she has built up a massive following in the hundreds of thousands, and is considered a major influencer. Which is all a bit nauseating and inspired some rather catty observations on reddit about copying people's recipes and just tweaking them slightly, without acknowledging them at all. Which is probably what most bloggers do, Well they're all building on what people have done before.

And that's what I do too - in the sense that I often have to tweak an actual recipe because I haven't got something I need, or I think it would be a good idea to add something else. Or else I just throw things together according to what I now know about what goes with what, and what the basic options are for dealing with any of them.

Anyway - my chosen recipe today attracted me because I liked the idea of a creamy sauce, and also I noticed that there was a bit of spinach in the mix, and I also bought a big bunch of spinach yesterday because it was so cheap and that goes off quickly too. I used more than half of the bunch yesterday in the concocted galette I made for dinner - which is why another pie was not really a good option for tonight.

However, I shall be tweaking, because although my chicken is thighs it is not bone-in, skin on as the recipe requires. Well you really cannot find that these days - unless you buy Marylands or a whole chicken. So I think I might just cut it into chunks. And there is cheese as well. Love cheese. Because of the cauliflower and spinach I won't need more vegetables, but we'll probably have a green salad after the chicken, pretending that we are in France.

But Chungah tells me I shall need some bread to sop up the sauce, so I have removed a frozen baguette from the freezer and will freshen it up in the oven as the chicken cooks.

I had also remembered a recipe I made some time ago from Jamie Oliver's 7 ways cookbook, which I remembered as being good, but couldn't quite remember the detail. So I checked it out - Cauli chicken pot pie he calls it, and indeed it's yet another kind of tart, so not suitable today. This one has bacon in it too. And it's good. But not for tonight.

So I started browsing and found a few potentials - herewith a few: Sheet pan chicken and cauliflower bake - Alexandra Stafford - Food 52; One-pan Greek chicken and cauliflower - Easy Family Recipes; Pan-fried chicken on roasted cauliflower with lemon and mustard sauce - Kate Nichols/delicious and Cauliflower with chicken breast in a frying pan - KAZAN - almost the only one to feature tomatoes, which is interesting and Cauliflower chicken casserole from A Zesty Bite, which is sort of like my chosen dish, but with smaller pieces and baked - cheese, cream, spinach, mushrooms. Mushrooms would be good in such a dish. But I don't have any at the moment. Well I don't think I have - I must check.

Then there were a couple of, shall I say, outliers. Garlic butter chicken with cauliflower rice - Eatwell 101in which the chicken breasts were fried and placed on top of cauliflower rice - riced cauliflower - which had been fried with onions I think; and One-pan curried chicken cauliflower - Green Healthy Cooking, which didn't look very curried and didn't mix the ingredients together - plus the arrangement was a tiny bit weird and maybe fussy and from Coles, Cauliflower and chicken pies for which the cauliflower was mashed to provide the topping - well it came from a Coles packet - as did the curried filling - but of course, you could make your own curried filling and mash your own cauliflower. You'd have to say it's a bit different.

At this point I decided that there were a few basic options that cropped up over and over again - tray bakes, casseroles - which really are a variation of tray-bakes (or vice-versa) but with more sauce. Stir-fries, pasta, curry and pies were the other most common options nd so I looked for another example of each: Chicken tray bake with cauliflower, rocket and lemon from the ABC; General Tso chicken + cauliflower stir fry - White Sparrow Food Company; Cauliflower chicken casserole - The Honour System; Chicken Pasta with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Spinach in a Creamy Cauliflower Sauce - Julia's Album; Chicken cauliflower curry - Sugar-free Londoner and Free-form corn, cauliflower and chicken pies - Taste.

To slightly change the subject. My son gave me a small cookbook recently - shown here, that a friend of his had self-published, and as he gave it to me he said that I should do the same. Well I certainly don't think I could actually do a book of recipes that I have 'created', mostly because the recipes that I create on an almost daily basis are never the same twice because they depend on what's in the fridge on that particular day. Besides I don't see myself as the next big thing in cookbooks and would never even try.

However, I have every now and then thought of putting together something that might give my increasingly fast-growing grandchildren some ideas for how to cook easy stuff for themselves, when they leave home - which may well be soon. And perusing all of these cauliflower and chicken recipes, makes me realise that one could possibly do this if you concentrated on the basic kinds of dishes we all throw together every day. Perhaps with a few ideas on how to learn what goes with what.

Have Some More is a rather nice little book and it made me realise how easy it is these days to self-publish something. Just use a layout program somewhere, produce a pdf and take it to your local printer. Or, of course, make one online with Snapfish, or Canva, even Officeworks. I' write about Mahdea's book some other time.

YEARS GONE BY

August 28

2024 - Blending cultures / culture wars in New York

2023 - Deliciously English

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Breakfast is on the move at Coles - literally

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Health bars à la Donna Hay and in general

2017 - Nothing

2016 - Buy when it's cheap