Recipe review - Roasted Cauliflower

One of my friends headed out on vacation, and before she left, she brought over all of her perishables that we would eat - basically all of her veg. Included was a small cauliflower and a lemon. As I said earlier, I'm going to try out a bunch of things that require little beyond what comes in my box of veg. This is somewhat outside those bounds, but did only require items that I already had in the house.

Here's the recipe I used:

Roasted Cauliflower
• 1 head of cauliflower
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, peeled and coarsely minced
• 1 lemon
• Olive oil
• Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut cauliflower into florets and put in a single layer in an oven-proof baking dish. Add garlic. Squeeze a lemon over cauliflower and drizzle each piece with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. If the oven hasn't reached 400°F yet, set aside until it has.
Place casserole in the hot oven, uncovered, for 15-25 minutes, until the top is lightly brown. Test with a fork for desired doneness. Remove from oven and sprinkle generously with Parmesan cheese.

My modifications:

• I don't keep Parmesan cheese at home, so I didn't add that at the end, but I was guessing that it was mostly for a little salty flavor. When I tasted it, I realized it had enough salt already and didn't need the addition
• The head of cauliflower I used was rather small, so I reduced the rest of the ingredients by about 1/2
• The florets I cut were a bit on the big side - I recommend that you cut them quite small
  

Conclusions:
This was a nice recipe, and I would certainly make it again. I found that the baking time given didn't make it quite as tender as you might otherwise hope for, so in the future, I'd bake it a bit longer. The lemon gave it a nice zing, and was the primary flavor. It might also be interesting to try a few seasoned breadcrumbs on the top - it might give it an interesting crunch. Overall, I recommend this to others, and will certainly make it again.

Curling at the new rink

This past Sunday was the first day of curling at the new rink at Northcross, and we dragged Michael and Andrea along to try it out

Curling with Michael and Andrea

Road rash photos

Here's the photos we took from the Road Rash. I took most of them, so it's after I finished skating.

TX Road Rash

CSA Starting

Summer Veg

It's summer in Austin, and today marks the first weekly box of veggies from our CSA from Hairston Creek Farms. For those who we haven't already bored with the description, this is the box of veggies and fruits that we get each week from a farm that is nearby - in our case, in Burnet, TX which is about 45 minutes north of Austin.

This year, we've elected to go with the every other week box since Tom is out of town every other week. We had a hard time keeping up with the veggies last year when we were both in town, so trying to have a box a week would just be way too much. Basically through the summer, we aim for this box to be the vast majority of what we eat. It helps us eat seasonally, locally and mostly plants.

This week we are getting
• Asparagus
• Beets
• Broccoli sprouts
• Lettuce
• Green Garlic
• Green Onions
• White Icicle Radishes
• French Breakfast Radishes
• Swiss Chard
• Strawberries
• Red and green lettuce

I'm going to start a project to collect recipes that I can make using the ingredients I get in the box with little else. Things that will have to be added include grains, beans and oils. There are a number of "farmer's market" type cookbooks, but they typically have vegetables combined that aren't in season at the same time in Texas. So this is what I get this week - what can I do with that?

Texas Road Rash

Both Tom and I participated in the Texas Road Rash this past Sunday. The event, now in it's 5th year, is a series of skating events. There was an Elimination Race on Saturday and then a 1/2 and full inline skating marathon on Sunday.

Last year, I was supposed to skate this event, but I had hurt my Achilles tendon a few weeks prior, so I wasn't able to participate.

This year, Tom participated in the full marathon (actually a bit longer at 28.2 miles) and I participated in the 1/2 marathon (14.1 miles). It was a beautiful day to skate - lovely temperature, mixture of clouds and sun. However, while skating 2 of the 4 sides of the looped course we were struggling against strong winds. Naturally the wind was blowing head-on where there was no protection from trees.

Tom managed to improve his per mile time over the last marathon he completed. The overall time was not comparable because the course was longer on this race.

And I did pretty well :-)

My sentiments exactly

I had a rotten set of days at work due to one very difficult candidate. It would not be terribly appropriate of me to talk about why, but as a surprise, one of my co-workers who was in Las Vegas this past weekend found me something that I needed to properly express my feelings in regards to this individual and the whole process.

Wilbur Buds!

Hey folks... (and especially Wilburs) there were some fun familiar sights in the coverage of Obama's visit to the Wilbur Chocolate Factory in Litiz earlier this week.

Photos, and a story, and another story

This was apparently covered on MSNBC on Joe Scarborough's morning program, but Tom looked and hasn't seen it or been able to find the video online.

Thanks Aunt Sue for pointing it out to us!

I wonder what the universe might be sharing

When Tom and I were in line on Election day for our precinct convention, the world suddenly became quite small when in the midst of chit chatting with those in line around me. As we were discussing where we were all originally from, after I said Ohio the guy behind us says "me too." I looked back at him and the lightening bolt of recognition hits. Quickly I'm all "What's your name?" and he's all "Sandeep" and I'm all "I'm Stephannie Behrens, we went to high school together!" Sandeep was Dan Kuhlman's (my high school boyfriend) best friend. Odd.

Then, I was home from work on Monday, laying on the sofa watching TV. An ad for Stanley Steemer Carpet Cleaners comes on. I've been in the presence of the ad before - Tom reminded me because I flipped it off in the past for whatever insipid message it contained. But due to my sub-par mental state at the time, I watched the ad. And I recognized something - Dan Kuhlman was IN THE COMMERCIAL.

Ok - given that he's an actor, I've always hoped for his sake that he would become successful and that I would see him in things. But was just so surprising to see him in the ad for Stanley Steemer. If you're curious, he plays a "husband" who looks distressed at the liquid exploding out of a blender. I'm working on getting a screen capture and I'll update with a photo.

Curling!

Tom and I are members of the Lone Star Curling Club. Ok, sure, we haven't been going to curl very much of late (sleep is winning the Sunday morning battle). But we still do love it.

The rink that we curl at is being relocated on the property. Part of the exciting part about the new rink is that they are putting the houses (the bullseye at the end of the curling rink) underneath the ice sheet. We had been drawing them on each week with markers on a huge compass (a 12' version of the one you used to use in high school geometry class)

Here are some pictures of the new rink and the beautiful houses:






The other exciting thing is that we are getting permanent rock storage, which sounds like a big old 'who cares', but the reason this is good is that curling stones need to be kept at ice temperature to work best. At the old rink this meant someone had to go put the rocks out on the ice the night before Sunday curling. Even then, they still weren't all that cold, and managed to get a nice thick coating of frost on them, which you had to chip off. To sum up, it was DULL and SUCKY

Anyway, here is the new rock storage area.

They really do smell like grape gum

And as I mentioned a few posts back, spring is in full force here, so I went and took some pics of the flowers blooming around our neighborhood. Also, the garden is starting to do well - i think it's time to pick the broccoli.

Click on the photo to open the album.

Spring flowers

Spring rain

We had some super heavy rains on Monday, and Tom took some pics of the flooding around our house. Ok....it wasn't actually flooding. We live near a street called Mesa, which basically means that if our house is being flooded, we've got much bigger problems. But we do have some interesting drainage problems

First, our front walk. We like to think of it as Lake Woodway. There is a low spot in the bottom right corner of the picture, and water collects there. This is further compounded because the downspout also empties there. For this storm, the lake extended all the way to the circular planter you can see at the top of the photo. This is about as big as the lake has ever been.


This is what it looks like when it's still pouring, but our rain barrels are full. Sometimes it shoots up like a geyser.


The street had (apparently) had an 18" or so wide stream running down it. Tom didn't want to go out in the rain, so here is a a pic from the front porch.


In summary, it was wet. The funny part to me is that my office is about a mile away from the house as the crow flies, and we weren't getting any rain at all when these pics were taken.

Recent quilt

This is the quilt that I made for one of my co-workers. She's having a little girl in July of this year. What I didn't know when I was making the quilt is that butterflies are important to her for a family reason. This quilt sort of put itself together, and I'm guessing that's why.

Runtex Distance Challenge

As I mentioned before, Tom finished the RunTex Distance Challenge this year. He finally got his finisher's jacket, and it's quite nifty this year.

....2 bits

Today, I finally got my hair cut. I realized a number of months back that it had gotten quite long, and desperately needed a substantial cut to get it back to looking healthy. Given the length at the time, I figured I'd just let it grow a bit more and donate it to Locks of Love. And naturally, since it wasn't rainy here today, I had David straighten it all out. Here is the end result:

First Bluebonnet

Yesterday I had my first bluebonnet sighting of the year. It was on the hill connecting our local elementary and middle schools. Texas wildflowers are on their way. Anyone who wants to see them should visit in the next month.