Vegan Cheesy Roasted Cauliflower

If you think you hate cauliflower or know someone who thinks they hate cauliflower, this is the way you need to try it. Actually, any vegetable you think you hate, you might like roasted. In this case, the cauliflower is also coated in seasoned nutritional yeast which makes it particularly tasty.

If you’re locked into going grocery shopping once a week or less, cauliflower, like broccoli, is very forgiving and will hang out and chill in your fridge for at least a week if not longer. When you aren’t sure of your plans day-to-day, these vegetables become your best friends.

cauliflower florets

Vegan Cheesy Roasted Cauliflower

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
2 TBS olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F. Spray a baking sheet with oil.

Cut cauliflower into fairly uniform florets about 1 1/2-2″ long and put them in a bowl with room to stir them around. Chop up the leftover stalk and feed it to your dog if she likes that kind of thing. (mine really does)

Stir together dry ingredients in a small bowl.

nutritional yeast seasoning

 

Drizzle olive oil over florets and stir to coat. Sprinkle dry ingredients over cauliflower and stir to coat. Pour out onto prepared baking sheet.

seasoned cauliflower

 

Bake 10 minutes, then stir around and bake another 10 minutes. Test to see if largest pieces can be pierced with a fork. If so, they’re done. If not, give ’em a few more minutes.

vegan cheesy roasted cauliflower

Do you roast vegetables? What’s your favorite?

Even prettier potato and green bean salad

Whenever new vegetarians or vegans ask about cookbooks, I’m pretty quick to recommend Vegan Italiano by Donna Klein. The recipes are pretty simple, the ingredients easy to find and it doesn’t rely on meat substitutions.

One of the recipes I like to take to cookouts is the Potato and Green Bean Salad. It’s great at room temperature, is pretty and actually has vegetables in it. If you want to take it up a notch, use purple potatoes. See?

This time I totally cheated and used frozen, pre-cut green beans. It made a nice side to my burger along with some roasted cauliflower.

Roasted cauliflower close-up

Golden cauliflower dal soup

World Feast Vegan has been sitting around unused for too long. So I fixed that by trying this Golden Cauliflower Dal Soup. I always seem to have a glut of red lentils around here and needed a way to use some up. This seemed perfect.

The cauliflower is roasted. You can see the little char spots on it floating in the soup. It’s an extra step but gave it a nice edge over other similar soups I’ve made. I also added a sprinkle of asafoetida (hing). It was no chore to destroy every last bit of the leftovers as lunch.

Wing Night

We had a bag of May Wah chicken legs taking up space in the freezer because I don’t use a lot of this sort of pre-made fake meat stuff. So this week in an effort to use up some freezer stuff, we had wings. And you can see that Kevin had to pay for this by having not one but two vegetables as sides: kale chips and roasted cauliflower. I just googled for a recipe for the cauliflower and this one was the first result. You only need half the oil, if that, and I just left out the parmesan and chives. Kevin didn’t complain about it so I guess he liked it. That or he was too excited about wings to complain. Oh, and this was the sauce for the wings. I stuck to the recipe amounts because I wasn’t sure how spicy it would be. It wasn’t very spicy. Maybe next time we’ll cut in some spicier hot sauce.