Roasted Cauliflower Salad

In general when I'm at work, I'll go for the salad bar if there is one available, it seems to be the only thing that stops me from falling asleep in the afternoon. That and soup, but in the last few years, I've not had any luck with restaurant soups, so generally opt for safety and avoid them. Where I work at the moment, the salad bar has ups and downs. On a good day (and this happens about every other week or so), one of the salads offered is roast cauliflower with peppers of different colours, salted gherkins, olives and sun dried tomatoes. This is absolutely yummy, and the other salad eaters agree, since this salad is usually one of the first to run out. I'd been racking my brain on how they do it, simple though as it is, now that I've sussed it.

And I did suss it thanks to realising the other day that it's been ages since I read the lovely Green Kitchen Stories blog, so I decided to catch up and spotted a salad with roasted cauliflower. I feel a bit embarrassed not having thought about it on my own. Thus step one - roast the cauliflower. It appears this year is a bad one for these wonderful vegetables, they are very small, so I ended up buying two.

Roast cauliflower

1. Before preparing the cauliflower, pre-heat the grill to 220 °C.
2. Remove all the greenery, cut up into florets and washed them.
3. Then lay them out on a shallow baking tray with a lip and brush generously with olive oil and sprinkle some salt or Vegeta.
4. It may help to also get your hands dirty and move the cauliflower around to get the pieces really well coated with the oil.
5. Place under the grill for 20 - 25 minutes and stir a couple of times during roasting. They just need to start softening somewhat and go brown and crunchy here and there, but not mushy.
6. Set aside to chill and store in the fridge. Mix in with your green salad.

This turned out to be quite a bit hit with Lundulph as well, even though he wasn't sure when he had a sniff of the cauliflower in the container where I'd put it. I'm not entirely sure what he was talking about, I didn't find the smell unpleasant, but cauliflower is a member of the cabbage family, I'm guessing there was some hint of fart.

I had intended to also do the tahini dressed chick peas, but I had plans already for my second tub of yoghurt and decided to leave them for another time.

What was left of the cauliflowers a couple of days later, I reheated with a covering of kashkaval - a Bulgarian yellow cheese, which was also extremely tastry.