Missy Pink Cheesy Cauliflower

Now white cauliflower, no one thinks twice about, but purple ones, we look back twice at to see if it really is that colour.  Gorgeous.

Rantings of an Amateur Chef talked about steaming cauliflower and then mashing it together and adding cheese.  Nice idea. Steaming vegetables – healthy.  Keeps in the goodness. Mashes it to mimic potato, no starches and lots of Vitamin C. Even better.
I like mashing carrots and swede together in winter.  But I had never tried cauliflower.
We just got a new rice cooker and it cooks more than rice.  It comes with a steamer basket.  I decided to test it out on our purple cauliflower.   Three cups of water in the bottom, and half a head of cauliflower cut up in the steamer basket.  The least number of minutes for steaming is 10 minutes so that is what I set it at.

Open the lid when finished and cooked vegetables.  I can see myself using this a lot.

Next, the cauliflower is placed into the food processor with cheese and made into mash.

I didn’t have blue cheese in the fridge so I used my supply of granulated Parmesan cheese and added about 4 heaped tablespoons along with about 1/8c low-fat milk.  I ended up adding more milk closer to 1/4cup.  I like it.  For parent’s who need to disguise vegetables to get their kids to eat them, this is a winner.

Now I teamed it with salmon tikka and raita (cucumber yoghurt) not shown.  Perhaps an odd combination but I like to mix things up a little. Jamie Oliver’s quick salmon tikka recipe wasn’t so quick when I realised that I didn’t have the curry paste and had to make my own with dry chili instead of fresh chili but that’s another story for another day.

I like the ease and quickness of the steamer in the rice cooker.  Plus it is easy to clean and I don’t have to wait around for water to boil on the stove.

Interestingly Panasonic only sells the multi-function concept for their rice cookers outside of Japan.  Steaming vegetables in a rice cooker is similar in idea as using a blow torch to light a candle. A big no-no.  A rice cooker is a rice cooker, nothing more in Japan.  I am pleased with the thinking outside of the box for the foreign market.  Multi-function products sometimes do everything badly, washing machine/dryers come to mind. I would never repeat that again.  But here with the rice cooker I do believe it does the functions well.  The box photograph said it also baked cakes and did slow cooking too.  The sales assistant told me that was not the case with slow cooking.  Perhaps that was why the price was such a bargain. I have never baked a cake in a rice cooker, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try it some day.

So far I have tried basmati rice and short grain rice and now steaming vegetables.   Thanks to Ranting of an Amateur Chef for getting me to steam my vegetables without kicking and screaming! Thumbs up to healthier ways of cooking.