Cooking For Joy
When a Bag of Cauliflower Is a Score
Manchurian Cauliflower is half virtue, half splurge
Heated has asked contributors to write about a dish they’re cooking that cuts through bleak headlines, forced isolation, and limited ingredients to bring them joy; we’ll be running at least one contribution a day through this social-distancing stretch.
I unpacked the shopping bags from my wife’s latest mission to an overcrowded, under-stocked grocery store. Buried somewhere underneath the dried beans, canned tomatoes, and weird-shaped pasta (spaghetti and toilet paper appear to be equally unattainable) was a bag of cauliflower florets. “Nice,” I said to her. “We can make that thing you love.” “Right,” she said, “I definitely wasn’t thinking of that when I bought it.”
That thing is Manchurian Cauliflower, a Chinese dish by way of India (or is it the other way around?) of batter-fried cauliflower florets tossed in a sweet-sticky sauce of ketchup, garlic, and cayenne. It’s one of her favorites and has been a staple in our dinner rotation for years. Sometimes I mess with the sauce a bit, tossing in ginger along with the garlic, a glug of soy sauce or black vinegar to rein in the sweetness of the ketchup, or some chile oil or red pepper flakes to up the heat. But, more or less, it comes out the same way every time: 50 percent splurge (yeah, it’s deep-fried), 50 percent virtuous (BUT IT’S CAULIFLOWER), 100 percent doable and delicious.
