Banana Bread Du Jour; Cauliflower Herb Banana Bread
Cauliflower Herb Banana Bread
Ingredients
- Cauliflower that you don’t feel like roasting, even though roasted cauliflower is pretty great, you’re just not feeling it.
- Fresh Tarragon you forgot you had.
Directions
Your highschool German teacher always told you that the food processor is not a time saving device, but you like to think it’s easier to clean things than manually puree them. Crudely break apart the cauliflower and dump it into the food processor to let it work its magic.
The food processor seems to need a lot of help. Just keep jamming the cauliflower bits back in there. Maybe add a little oil and some salt to extract the liquid. Scrape the sides and push the big chunks down. Hear your German teacher’s words on repeat as you scrape down the sides and pulse the cauliflower only to hear the blades are once again slicing through air. Take some of the larger chunks out and chop them finely before adding them back in. Pulse, scrape, and repeat.
Make yourself a cup of tea that you’ll forget about on the counter; you’ll be grateful when this is over.
Rinse and chop the tarragon and toss that in the food processor too. Add some dried Herbs De Provence. Pulse, scrape, and repeat. The mixture finally becomes sufficiently liquid that it’s headed towards a puree without needing constant attention. Leave the food processor running as you…
pre-heat oven to 350 F.
Mix your dry ingredients in a bowl:
Spelt Flour, Amaranth Flour, a little more salt, baking soda.
Take some Teff flour and pour just a little hot water over it to soften it. This step is probably optional.
Zest most of 1 lemon into the dry ingredients.
Mix the teff flour into the dry ingredients and ask yourself why you made this harder by moistening it first.
Your cauliflower and herbs is now at least mostly pureed. Add it to the top of your dry ingredients.
Crack two eggs over the cauliflower puree.
Recall the jalapeños in the fridge. Fact: Jalepeños are an excellent source of vitamin C and tingly-hot sensations. Thinly slice one small green jalepeño and add it to the mix.
Add a heaping tablespoon of yogurt. Will this make a difference? Does anything?
Stir together into a dough. Add just a little dusting of while flour because you probably should’ve previously.
Grate some parmesan cheese over your dough. Should you have used the food processor for this? Would that have required the slicer/grater attachment? Would that attachment have saved you time with the cauliflower? Can the food processor save time? How are you still grating cheese with increasingly sore hands and shoulders but there’s still so much cheese left?
Mix dough again until white flour is incorporated.
Grease a round baking dish. Ask yourself if two loaf pans would be better, but you don’t feel like washing the baking dish you’ve just greased.
Pour dough mixture into baking dish, feeling some relief as the top of the dough comes just under the upper lip of the dish. Smooth out the top and drizzle some olive oil over it, top with a sprinkle of msg and coarse sea salt.
Your oven finished pre-heating long ago. Survey the dishes, noting the fine coating of cauliflower crumbs and jalepeno seeds. Place baking dish in oven, set timer for 64 minutes and hope for the best.
Hey look, it’s that cup of tea you made and it’s just warm enough to still be pleasant! Enjoy what there is to enjoy.
When the timer goes off, bake for another 10 minutes because a knife comes out very wet. Turn the oven off a couple minutes before this timer goes off and just leave it in the oven because you have a 9:30 meeting that’s about to start.
After your meeting let it cool a little on the counter and then remove from baking dish and cool on a wire rack.
Reviews
the crusts are great and salty, but the texture is just too wet and mushy. Obviously the yogurt was a mistake. Two loaf pans would’ve been better. Be a responsible adult: cut into wedges and lightly fry each exposed wedge face, thus creating more crust, which is the best part.
- 4/10 : edible and decent tasting but would do differently next time.
- “It tastes like stuffing” – a more charitable reviewer
- “Sounds good, like 1970s vegetarian food. I hate to tell you that the precooking of cauliflower you don’t want to do is what would save you from swampiness.” – your friend Jess, who is a very good cook and baker
- “I kept waiting for the banana to appear.” – an equally skilled cook and baker