I love those times when you intend to cook one thing, and it turns out not so good but only because the context of the food wasn't a fit. Change the context and now the underwhelming food turns into a spectacular food. Today, I intended to make soup but ended up with a really cool new recipe for a thick vegan, gluten-free curry sauce.
*doing the happy dance*
Dr. Andrew Weil was on Dr. Oz's show last week, and they made this most delicious looking Curried Cauliflower soup (recipe here) from Dr. Weil's new True Food
If you ever have the chance to eat at a True Food Kitchen. Go! You will LOVE it. One of the things I miss most about living in Phoenix is that I lived 2 miles from a True Food Kitchen and was there almost every week.
I had almost all the ingredients to Dr. Weil's soup except cumin and tumeric so I thought I'd make the soup anyway just using Trader Joe's brand Curry Powder. There's a little cumin and tumeric in the curry powder. I didn't have cashews either so I used rice milk instead.
The recipe called for boiling the cauliflower, but I've been so addicted to roasted vegetables lately that I decided to roast my cauliflower with red onions, sea salt, and olive oil so I'd have some caramelized onion goodness in my soup.
I made the soup as the recipe called for with my substitutions, and it was alright. The soup didn't knock my socks off but it wasn't bad. I felt more like I was eating curry sauce from the bowl, so I switched to Plan B and decided to make a curry main dish with my soup.
Mom and I bought a whole bunch of produce yesterday, and I had small Chinese eggplant, carrots, and sweet potato along with some extra cauliflower. I cut the vegetables in about 1/2" cubes to get about 3/4 cup for each vegetable. I boiled the vegetables for 8 minutes with olive oil and salt to tenderize.
I sliced up two of the eggplant and sauteed the eggplant with red onion, garlic, sea salt and olive oil in a wok until the eggplant was tender. I added 1/3 cup more rice milk to the soup to thin it out so it was more sauce-like than soup-like. I put the boiled vegetables into the wok wit the eggplant and poured in the curried caulifower soup and mixed everything all together.
I ate my new vegan eggplant, sweet potato, carrot, cauliflower curry with a side of Jasmine rice. Not only was I excited to have a delicious easy meal, I was thrilled to now have a new vegan, gluten-free curry sauce recipe. The blended cauliflower helps make the curry sauce thick without the use of cream. Score!
I love when kitchen accidents turn into happily tummy after.
