Recipe for Spiced Coffee Rubbed Pork with Cauliflower and Bean Puree-Daring Cooks

Once a month I join a group of adventurous cooks online in cooking up something new.  It might be preparing an unusual or unfamiliar recipe from around the world or trying out a specific cooking technique.


Our April 2012 Daring Cooks hosts were David & Karen from Twenty-Fingered Cooking. They presented us with a very daring and unique challenge of forming our own recipes by using a set list of ingredients!  The challenge was to cook using 1 ingredient from each list:


List 1: Parsnips, Eggplant (aubergine), Cauliflower
List 2: Balsamic Vinegar, Goat Cheese, Chipotle peppers
List 3: Maple Syrup, Instant Coffee, Bananas

Recipe for Cauli-Kale "Surprise"

Have you ever had colcannon?  It's mashed potatoes and cabbage, of Irish roots I believe.  There was a restaurant in San Francisco that served it frequently and I grew to love it-made me feel less guilty about eating potatoes!


When I was on the South Beach diet, a favorite was South Beach "Surprise", mashed cauliflower with Laughing Cow cheese.  We still eat a lot of it.  Mr. ELEB likes it and it is one of the only ways I'll eat cauliflower.  I have roasted some from time to time and can eat that.  Oh, and I love cauliflower soup! And I loved the cauliflower sformato I made a while ago.  OK, I guess I like cauliflower.


So, all that by way of introduction of how I came up with this recipe.  I had a head of cauli and some kale.  I had Laughing Cow, but opted instead to use herbed goat's cheese.

Recipe for Cumin Cauliflower Casserole with Cheesy Tostitos Topping

Wow, that title is quite the mouthful!  Just trying to be descriptive. 

Last week we got to try the new Tostitos Fire Roasted Chipotle Tortilla Chips as a base for my Ahi Edamame Nachos.   They got an A for taste on their own with some dip and were a great complement to the nachos.

This week we opened the Roasted Garlic Black Bean Tortilla Chips. 

They are nice and thin like the Chipotle ones and held up well to being dipped in some hummus. 

I’ll have to say, the flavor was a bit underwhelming for me.  I’m not sure that if I hadn’t known what the flavor was whether I’d have been able to identify it.  They aren’t bad but I don’t get much garlic and no black bean flavor.  Disappointing.  Ah, well. 

I wanted to give them a try in a recipe so I whipped up this cauliflower dish.

Recipe for Cauliflower Sformato

This recipe for Cauliflower Sformato definitely goes on the “Eat Big” list!  At 283 calories per small serving, you can see why.  It’s also full of eggs, milk, parmesan, butter, olive oil, flour…  I lightened up the original recipe as much as I thought I could get away with and switched out regular flour for white whole wheat and it turned out quite good.  Delicate and soothing, like comfort food!