Today, Chris and I ate cauliflower soup and a pear, blue cheese, hazelnut salad (see Salads with Pears on this blog). It was a good wintry meal…lots of white and green. I am not always a fan of cauliflower. I like it in Indian food and I like this soup. I can’t really remember where I got the recipe, but I have a vague memory that the goal was to create a low-fat “cream” soup. Wherever it was from, I copied this recipe into my college recipe notebook and later on to the index card system that I used until starting this blog.
The recipe calls for one little tablespoon of cream cheese which is, despite the name, not a particularly high fat cheese. What this recipe lacks in fat it makes up for in clever seasoning. It calls for miso, tabasco sauce and spike which (for those of you who are not familiar with hippy cuisine) is a vegetable seasoning salt. The result is really excellent and also very simple to make! I have a feeling that the same sort of seasoning would work well with broccoli or asparagus as well. Would someone do that experiment and let me know how it goes?
PERFECTLY SEASONED CREAMY CAULIFLOWER SOUP
- 5 cups cauliflower (1 head)
- 3 cups good meat stock or good vegetable stock
- 1 Tablespoon sweet white miso
- 1 Tablespoon cream cheese
- 1 Tablespoon spike
- 1/4 cup cubed carrots
- 1/4 cup chopped celery
- 1/4 cup mined scallions
- 1 teaspoon tabasco
- 1/4 teaspoon white pepper
- 1/2 cup peas
- Cook the cauliflower in stock until it is tender. While its cooking you can chop all of the other vegetables.
- Add the miso, cream cheese and spike and puree the soup in a blender or using a submersion blender until it is totally smooth.
- Add the carrots, celery and scallions and simmer until the vegetables are tender.
- Add the tabasco, white pepper and green peas just before serving.
Big Sis Little Dish 
I JUST this weekend make the Cauliflower soup from the Quick & Easy Indian Cooking book. I found it did not need the cream it called for…I love that recipe because it really IS so quick and so easy and SO delicious. I think cauliflower is just a vehicle for yummy spices.
I also recently heard friends of mine say they were serve broiled cauliflower with horseradish and maybe lemon juice? Something bizarre but strangely delicious-sounding. So I bought cauliflower. And then made the soup. Mm.
Ooooooh I’ll have to try the one from the Quick and Easy Indian book. You should try this one. Its really good.
I will think hard about who mentioned the cauliflower and horseradish recipe…I never made it, someone just told us about it.
Mmmm cauliflower IS so good! It’s one of those veggies we all think we hate because our mothers served it to us boiled. Bleaaagch! Or my mother’s favorite: she’d boil an entire head of cauliflower and then pour cheese sauce over it. really. she was fond of pouring cheese sauce over veggies to get us to eat them.