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sometimes I get my recipes from my favorite cookbook, the sprouted kitchen, other times the food and wine or whole food websites. but sometimes there are nights where I just need some extra help and I look to the all powerful google to give me the answer. last night, knowing I had a few items and that cauliflower was one of them, I found the love & lemons blog, and the perfect cauliflower pasta recipe.

Before you check out because you hate what you know of cauliflower, don’t. Jeremy hates it, too. or hated it, until I made this dish last night, and now he is a believer!

Because so many of you asked for the recipe on instagram, I am copying and pasting the recipe below, but you really must try it, and you must check the blog out. she is, as far as I can see, a fantastic chef, and as a vegetarian, i adore the liberal use of fresh, seasonal, whole ingredients often found in her recipes.

a few personal notes:
I modified the recipe a bit to feed 4.
1 entire head of cauliflower
2 shallots
3 garlic cloves
1 entire bunch of fresh organic spinach
2 lemons, zest of 1
1 cup feta cheese (because jeremy is feta crazy)
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil leaves
1/4 cup sliced toasted almonds
1/4 cup toasted bread crumbs (you MUST toast them, it really changes the flavor)
2 poached eggs on top, so everyone got 1/2 of one on top of their pasta when plated.

I left out the sun dried tomatoes and red pepper flakes because I didn’t fancy them that night.
And in my humble opinion, the poached eggs are a MUST.

oh. my. gosh. they were so heavenly.

here’s how I poached the eggs:

4 cups water
1 T red wine vinegar

bring to heavy boil.
crack 1 egg into a small bowl. (I used the small dish we have for coffee creamer, because it pours easily)
turn down water and vinegar to a low boil and pour in the egg gently so it doesn’t break.
one moment later, pour in the second egg.
2 minutes on the timer, then pull out with a slotted spoon and keep in a bowl of warm water until it’s time for it to garnish the pasta.

voila!
Tu dois le faire, c’est très bon!

I have never been a baker.
nor did I think it was an art that I would ever begin to navigate.
my experience with baking has been limited to banana breads or the pillsbury can of crescent rolls, which were replaced in the past couple of years with the frozen croissants (chocolate) from trader joes. I bake those. hard. but baking them means I just take them out of the freezer at night, bake them in the morning and voila! croissant baked magic!

but this was a completely new undertaking. to make my first bonafide loaves of bread, from scratch.
My inspiration came in the form of our friend ken parsons, husband to my dear friend carrie and father to two of our boys friends, who is a baking sensei and has perfected many, many loaves of bread and shared them with us over many parsons family meals.
at our most recent meal, we shared a couple of beautiful loaves that ken had made fresh that afternoon, and I decided at first bite that I must at least

t r y

to make this bread with my own two hands for our family. so, with a recipe book and some very important supplies loaned by ken, and his phone number on my speed dial to text with random questions every hour or so, Jeremy and I embarked on an 18 hour journey to bake bread for the first time.

the book:
Bread Alone
bold fresh loaves from your own hands
by Leader and Blahnik

the recipe:
Classic Country style Hearth Loaf
made into round boules

the process began the night before, making my first poolish and praying in the morning I would find a beautiful starter for the bread.
then the next morning, mixing the final dough (in jeremy’s grandmother’s kitchen aid mixer from the wartime era and still turning like a champ), kneading the final dough (about 30 minutes), fermenting the final dough (about 3 hours), deflating and resting the dough (30 minutes), dividing the dough and shaping the loaves (10 minutes), proofing the loaves (2-3 more hours), scoring then baking the loaves (40 minutes of crazy anticipation and nervous excitement!), cooling the loaves (at least 20 minutes of smelling the heaven, but not eating it!), then . . . E A T !

here was the process in photographs, including a visit from my bread sensei at the end of the experience – I love how fresh I look when it all begins, and how worn out I am at the end.
it’s a beautiful, delicate, and time consuming art, but the next time you have a loaf of fresh artisan bread, be thankful for the work . . . very, very thankful.

as for us, we have already made the recipe again, and our hope is to have fresh country style hearth loaves in our bread box for the foreseeable future.