Red and green cauliflower tacos
Serves 4 adults
Cooking time: 90 minutes
Ingredients
1 large cauliflower with leaves intact
1 red capsicum (optional)
8 beetroot tortillas (or use corn or wheat)
2 tins of refried beans (or make your own)
Red salsa
8 dried red chillies (de arbol)
1/2 a dried ancho chile
2 dried cascabel chillies
3-4 chipotle chillies
1 t coriander seeds
2 T tomato paste
2 T olive oil
1/4 t paprika (smoked or plain)
juice of 1/2 a lime
2 good pinches of salt, pepper
Green salsa
2 spring onions
4-5 cloves garlic, peeled
1 fresh jalapeño
1/2 white onion, diced
15 g fresh coriander
15 g fresh parsley
pinch dried oregano
3 T olive oil
juice of half a lime
salt and pepper to taste
Fresh tomato salsa
1/2 white onion, finely chopped
pinch dried oregano
pinch dried thyme
small bunch coriander
3 semi-dried tomatoes
handful cherry tomatoes
1 large heirloom tomato
1 fresh jalapeño
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste
swig olive oil
Guacamole
2 ripe avocados
1/2 white onion, finely chopped
juice of 1/2 a lime
2-3 large, or 5-6 cherry tomatoes
handful, finely chopped coriander
salt and pepper to taste
Method
Pre-heat oven to 200°C (fanbake).
Prepare the cauliflower. Fill your largest saucepan (ideally a stock pot) with water and bring to the boil. It needs to be able to fit the whole cauliflower. Once boiled, trim the cauliflower leaves but do not remove. Place in pot of boiling water whole for around 10 minutes, until a knife detects a little softness. Remove and allow to cool down. Do not throw out cooking water yet.
For the red salsa: cut the ends off the dried chillies and discard the seeds. Heat up a heavy-bottomed frying pan, turn on your extractor to full and open a window. Cook the chillies in the pan for around 1 minute, so that they are toasted but not blackened. Pour 100ml boiling water over the chillies and leave to soak. After 10 minutes, put the chillies with their water into a blender. Add remaining red salsa ingredients, working in batches if necessary until thick and smooth.
For the green salsa: cut the ends off the two jalapeños and remove seeds. Cut in half. In the same hot frying pan, char the garlic cloves, jalapeños and three spring onions with the roots chopped off. This will take between 4-5 minutes. Press the jalapeños skins-down with a spatula so that they get some colour. Retain one of the jalapeños for the fresh tomato salsa. Add everything else to a blender with all the green salsa ingredients, blend into a pesto-like consistency, working in batches if necessary.
Once it is cool enough to handle, chop the cauliflower into thick slices. If it crumbles as mine did, that is fine, just put all the pieces onto a tray lined with baking paper, along with the leaves. If using capsicum, then cut the end off, remove seeds and cut into long strips, add to the tray. Cook in the oven for around 20 minutes, turning part way through. The cauliflower pieces should be browning and have lost most of their water. After 20 minutes, paint the pieces with the green and red sauces, half and half. Leave to cook for a further 20 minutes, until well-done. They should still be intact but very soft.
For the guacamole: smash the avocados in a mortar and pestle until smooth. Chop the tomatoes and squeeze out the juice before chopping the flesh into small cubes. Add all ingredients and give the mixture another few mashes with the pestle. Taste and adjust seasoning.
For the fresh tomato salsa: smash the semi-dried tomatoes in a mortar and pestle with the onion until it has become a sort of paste. Add remaining roasted jalapeño, along with other tomato salsa ingredients and mix well with the pestle. Taste and adjust seasoning.
To serve: Warm the tortillas in the oven (or fold them in half and leave them for 30 seconds each in the toaster, it works a treat) and heat up refried beans in a pan with half a cup of the cauliflower water. Place the tray of cauliflowers on the table with the refried beans, three salsas and the guacamole, so everyone can make their own tacos. Top with sliced (de-seeded) red chillies, quick-pickled red onions, chopped coriander or spring onions. Enjoy!
The story behind the recipe
This week’s post is a wintry, Dutch take on some of the incredible fresh food I ate while I was in Mexico visiting my brother not long ago. Mexican must be one of my favourite cuisines, but cauliflower is not exactly common Mexican fare. The only time I ate cauliflower while I was there was as part of a vegetarian molé at a very fancy place called Restaurant Oaxaca in Oaxaca City. I don’t remember seeing cauliflowers at the markets. There were, instead, the holy trinity of corn, beans, squash. There were squash flowers, stringy fresh cheese, mounds upon mounds of fresh and dried chillies, fat bunches of coriander, papaya, pineapples, limes. A boy sitting in a corner of a market with a pile of cactus leaves, chopping off the prickles for nopales, which is slippery and slightly bitter but tasty when fried. I don’t know where to get nopales in The Netherlands, even finding fresh tomatillos is near impossible. But I can find cauliflower, cauliflower is everywhere right now. And I have for a while been thinking about how to create a Mexican dish with cauliflower as a centrepiece. Cauliflower is, after all, central to many vegetarian dishes I love. Why not give it a Mexican twist?
It just so happened that I celebrated a birthday in Mexico. We went out on a small fishing boat before daybreak and watched the giant red sun rising over the land, the sky blushing briefly before settling into its endless blue. I sat on the stern of the boat as we stopped a little distance from a pod, hundreds of spinner dolphins. Some of them swam towards us, kept time with the boat as we motored gently away, diving under, then cresting, a pair of them swimming in a double helix formation through the water. I am given a snorkel and I dive into the water without hesitation. A thousand glowing tiny jellyfish brush my skin. I am alive.
Afterwards, hair and skin still crusty with salt, we ate breakfast at a tiny vegan café called Cocofam. It is inconspicuous, tiny. Rough hewn wooden tables and chairs scattered in someone’s backyard, a wooden roof, a shack bar at one end covered in huge earthenware pots topped with lids turbaned with embroidered cloths, a brick terrace. It is nearly dia de los muertos and there are small bunches of golden marigolds and velvet pink-red cockscombs on the tables. We sit under a tree that casts dappled light over our faces and eat taco rosa (beetroot pink tortillas, mushroom, molito, pineapple) and taco verde (spinach tortillas, green peppers, green apple), side salads, a thick, spicy cocoa and rice drink called chilate, served in chunky terracotta cups with ice.
I had those red and green tacos in mind when cooking this week. I also had in mind a famous fish dish served at Contramar called Pescado a la Talla, where a flat fish is butterflied open then painted with half red with a chipotle salsa and half green with a herby salsa verde. Christmas is long gone, but I want a table full of reds and greens.
I first learned how to make guacamole from a Mexican woman called Paula in Montreal, years ago. Her Venezuelan waiter boyfriend started chatting to two girls sitting with their suitcases in an Argentinian café, eating empanadas and calling hostels to find a place to stay for the night. It was winter. Snow was piled high on the streets outside. He gave us his number and his address and invited us to sleep on their couch. We accepted. Paula’s kitchen was warm, spicy and bright, with Tibetan flags hung across it. She gave me a giant bowl, a chopping board, a knife, instructed me on how to make her guacamole. What I remember is that she didn’t use garlic and she mashed the guacamole until it was super creamy. I also use her technique to squeeze limes, turning them inside out and squeezing to get every last bit of juice. She leaves all the stones in so that the guacamole doesn’t go brown before you eat it.
My brother in Mexico knows I am a vegetarian. Of course he knows, he has known this about me for most of his life. For my birthday he says “I’ll order for us.” We are in a fancy restaurant for dinner. It is his shout. I have difficulty following the Spanish, but I hear salad. Salad sounds safe enough. It comes out, piled onto a plate, tomato, cucumber, capsicums, crunchy fried grasshoppers as long as my fingers. He is genuinely surprised when I say I won’t eat them. “Come on sis, you’re a foodie, you’re in Mexico, have an adventure.”
Luckily, adventures come in all shapes and flavours. This week’s adventure looks like a cauliflower that has been cooked until it is soft and charred at the edges, that you can pull apart with your fingers. It looks like a table of colours that is the bright thing at the end of a very grey weekend of storm, wind, rain. It looks like a reason to use some of the dried chillies you bought online back at the start of the pandemic when you were still getting used to this online shopping thing and you found an online Mexican stockist and 100 grams really didn’t sound like very much so you ordered 500 grams of each type, 3 kilos worth of dried chillies. The delivery came in three banana boxes. You’ve given a bunch away and you must still have a year’s supply of dried chillies left.
You could simplify this recipe by making only the green or only the red sauce. Or just make it with store-bought jars of green tomatillo or chipotle sauces. Skip the fresh salsa and the guacamole. If you’re not a fan of chillies, stick with the milder green sauce. You could also serve the cauliflower on rice instead of tortillas.
In other culinary adventures, this week I also cooked Jamie’s moussaka and this vegan traybake ragu from the eponymous Ottolenghi, featured in his cookbook Flavours. Both are really excellent. No surprises there, anything with porcini is bound to be good. With thanks to our neighbours who brought us back a huge panettone from Italy, I also cooked a new recipe for panettone pudding, a take on bread-and-butter pudding. It has a jiggly custardy texture in the middle and a bit of crunch on the outside. I added a splash of cointreau for an extra orange flavour and served with vanilla ice-cream.
Happy cooking!
Amelia.