Roasted Cauliflower and Vegetable Soup combines beautiful white cauliflower and other veggies in a cream based soup with cheese.

Roasted Cauliflower and Vegetable Soup

By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

Roasted Cauliflower and Vegetable Soup, my recipe of the day, is a creative cauliflower recipe in soup form. Now isn’t that a fun way to think about it?

You see, during my life, cauliflower has gone through an evolution of sorts. When I was young this veggie was generally frozen, and served with the crap boiled out of it. Being quite young, it wasn’t my favorite, but  Mom being the clever one, tried to make it more palatable by calling them white flower bushes and the broccoli (of course, being another “bludgeoned with boiling water until it passed all recognition” type of cruciferous vegetable)–well, the broccoli were trees. And this may have worked a few times, but Mom’s children were the clever type and were onto her tricks.

Thus the old adage: “Don’t get up from the table until you have eaten it!” And my brothers fared worse than I did, as this rule seemed to apply to any type of vegetation they faced. I could actually down most of the hot veggies, but not the tossed salad drowned in orange French dressing my mother insisted upon.

But years passed, Rudolph grew up at the North Pole each year, we children grew taller and more adventurous at mealtime, especially when it became trendy to drown the dreaded bushes and trees in cheddar cheese sauce. And at that point, since we were into anything remotely cheesy, we just couldn’t get enough. Until enough was enough.

By then the teenage kids were into salad bars, frequenting such 1960’s and 1970’s family restaurants such as Ponderosa and Bonanza with their salad bars, and of course, RAX, which was basically Arby’s with a salad bar. And on those,  we could drown our raw veggies beneath any sort of cheese sauce or salad dressing we chose.

And while we still do, being creative with recipes always makes things easier to eat over and again. And by now, with decades having passed since my first bites, I have been all over the map with creative recipes for cruciferous veggies, and today is just another excursion down cauliflower row.

My recipe today is an interesting take on a creamy vegetable soup for me, as roasting the vegetables brings out a flavor you would not get otherwise. And in  the last ten years or so,  roasting veggies has made them so much better for me. I used to HATE Brussels Sprouts until I roasted  some and it brought out the caramelized flavor. And that flavor is brought out here as well. You just cannot achieve it by simply tossing the veggies into a hot bathtub of soup.

And knowing year after year that a little cheese brings out the best in this vegetable, I have added a little of that as well, to put it over the top. So this takes all the love of that first delicatessen broccoli cheese soup and throws it over the top.
Thanks for taking a little trip down  memory lane with me for what is now one of my favorite vegetables. And while I had intended to have time to get my recipe for Gobi Manchurian Cauliflower ready, and had to postpone it because I hadn’t been feeling great this week, I still hope to get that up in the near future.

Join me tomorrow when I share my recipe for Vanilla Cupcakes with the ease of using the new Pillsbury Pastry bags, which are preloaded with frosting and include a piping tip- no mess, no fuss. There will also be a link for a coupon  if you want to give it a try.

~Sue