Creamy Garlic and Purple Cauliflower Pasta

Pre-post note- You may have noticed that I have been blogging less. I have decided to blog 1-3 times per week as opposed to daily/every other day. Its taking a lot of time away from my family and housework. And I don’t want to look up from my blog one day and see my little baby daughter is going to college and I blogged away her childhood. So I’ll just be slightly less posting =)

This is just about the most delicious pasta I’ve ever made. I ate two whole plates of it and I generally don’t eat that much.

You will need-

1 pound of pasta
(I used squid ink pasta, but you can use any you like. Squid ink pasta makes it that much better though!)
Half a large head of purple cauliflower broken into bite size pieces
(you can use white cauliflower, I just prefer the amazing flavor of purple)
5 cloves of organic garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons of organic olive oil
4 tbsp. grass fed butter
3 tbsp. organic flour
1.5 c. raw milk

Its beautiful isn’t it?!

Cook your pasta and set it aside. Put the olive oil, garlic and cauliflower into a skillet and cook it until the cauliflower has started to cook, but is still crunchy.
Make a roux from the flour and butter. (If you don’t know how, the couscous section of this post explains it.) Add the milk to your roux and cook it on medium heat until it thickens. Add the cauliflower and garlic to the roux and get it totally covered then mix in the pasta. (Or you could pour the sauce over everything.) And that’s it!

Add a little fresh grated Parmesan and crushed red pepper.

As my dad always said, ‘Yum, yum, eat em up!’

Enjoy!

The Strip District, Pittsburgh PA

Before I get too deep into this post, I’d just like to point out this has nothing to do with strippers. ‘The Strip District‘ in Pittsburgh is merely a strip of road, (hence, ‘strip’) with a bunch of cute little food shops and stores.

If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, I suggest you go take a look.

Also, some of these are definitely not real food, just interesting things I came across. Some I plan to cook with and some are just funky so I bought them… Cuz I’m an impulse shopper and I love strange things.

First up is the dragon fruit. Super beautiful, interesting little fruit from Thailand. They have the texture of a kiwi and taste very sweet. It was actually quite good. They are really hard to find over here in the US, but we went in an Asian grocery and found the little bugger hiding in there.

Next we have some squid ink pasta. Just three ingredients- Flour, eggs and squid ink. It gets its dark color from the ink. Yum!

As well as some Chinese hot peppers and Pakistani hot peppers. I love hot peppers.

Then some yummy tea balls. These little sucker are awesome. Put em in hot water and they open up into a flower of tea and flavor. They look as beautiful as they taste. I got a few mint ones and a few butterfly flower ones. Can’t wait to enjoy some!!

Brown rice noodles, sesame oil, a package of seaweed, the dragon fruit, a cassava, instant jellyfish and the peppers.

The cassava. A root vegetable from South America and Africa packed with vitamin C. I won’t delve into it too much, since you’ll be seeing a post on what I make from it and I’ll tell ya more then! =)

Jackfruit! Super huge, super cool (super expensive!) fruit from many Asian countries. I found him in the same Asian grocery we got the dragon fruit. I can’t wait to chop this (18 lb!) baby up and make things from him. Yet another blog post I will be writing…. However I will tell you that the jackfruit’s flesh is used as a vegan meat substitute. The texture is supposed to be just like chicken.

Crappy picture, but apple juice from just one kind of apple. They had all different flavors. However, you would have had no idea of different flavors if you didn’t have a few to taste test at the same time. In that case they were noticeably different!

Totally not healthy or real food, but a Kinder bueno, basically a Nutella kit-kat. I honestly have no idea what was in it because the whole wrapper was written in Italian! But it was nifty and yummy!

Lastly alligator, wild boar and pheasant jerky and sticks. They were all ‘pheasantly’ delicious. (Hehe, see what I did there….)

I love interesting food!!

I can’t wait to cook up my jackfruit and cassava and share with you!

~Courtney, The Crunchy Delinquent