Cauliflower

Day two of my visit home and I decided to cook up something unexpected!  Big, white, fluffy cauliflower! Woo hoo! First of all, my father looked at the huge serving of cauliflower I had prepared and was anything but ecstatic. …great… Ben’s cooking dull, taste-less, rabbit food… I knew this meal could be a tough pill to swallow, so I had to take out the big guns!

To clarify, my father is a meat-lover. Most dads are. Steak, hamburger, chicken, or pork should fill the air at most meal times.  A major dish at lunch consisting of rabbit food was a little disappointing to say the least. So, I thought… if I could transform the flavor of this vege into something mouth-watering and meaty, what would it taste like?

Let’s Tarantino this recipe so that the food-drama doesn’t go to waste…

* There was silence on our front porch… a small dog could be heard barking in the distance… an orchard medley serving dish sat still, void of its contents… mere drops of flavorful liquid collected in a lonely serving spoon.  My mother had never seen this side of her husband since the day he first set eyes on… the love of his life… (that would be a pulled pork shoulder sandwich). Then, the time came for him to speak…

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1~ Step one: Cut up your head of cauliflower into bite sized pieces. Let them sit in boiling water for a few minutes before you start cooking. Prepare sausage into bite sized pieces as well. (I used 2 thick links of spiced sausage) Prepare your garlic and ginger slices, and then put them aside.

2~ Cook the sausage pieces in water, turning them often, until they are mostly cooked (brownish). Add water if it gets too dry. After a few minutes, toss in the garlic and ginger.

3~ Then, strain out the water from preboiling the cauliflower and dump them into the pan. They need color, so you could pour some soy sauce over them while constantly turning them with a spatula.

4~ The SECRET: Scoop out nearly 2 big spoon-fulls of Lee Kum Kee’s Char Siu Sauce. It will seem jelly-like, so we’ll need to mix water in with it. As it liquefies, keep mixing the sausage and cauliflower over one another. Cover with a lid.

5~ Cauliflower is thick, so it needs to simmer a while like this. My dish, which consisted of 3/4 head of vege, took close to 5 minutes of simmering with occasional stirring. The sauce should fill about an inch of the pan or wok.

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Cauli-Sausage

* “Wow” was all he said. Just “wow.” But it wasn’t like the wow you say to make someone else feel good about a cool story they just told you. It was more like the wow you say when you witness a grand slam at Fenway. It was more like the wow you say when watching a human-fish win 8 gold medals in Beijing. Wow.

And that is how you make cauliflower with sausage – a dish inspired by real Chinese cooking.