Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Red Beet Chips and Banana Bread Pudding

It's been a while since my last post, don't worry I am not giving up.  It's been really cold so I decided to try to make a dent in the soup recipes and tackle the cream of cauliflower soup with red beet chips and the banana bread pudding.

To start the soup base, I sauteed the chopped cauliflower with leeks, onions, and curry.  The book calls for the use of a "parchment lid" in quite a few recipes.  You basically make a steamer lid with a hole in the center to cover the pot while the vegetables cook.  It allows the steam to escape through the hole in the center and since the rest of the dish is covered, prevents the liquid from evaporating and the vegetables from caramelizing.  I have been a little wary of the parchment lid because I can just see it coming off the pot and catching on fire on my gas stove, but I decided to give it a try.  It did work, the cauliflower and other vegetables cooked evenly and did not brown.  After the vegetables were ready, I added milk, heavy cream, and water to the soup and pureed it with an immersion blender.

The next step for the soup was the red beet chips to garnish.  I have never cooked with a beet before and boy are they messy.  My hands looked like I had soaked them in red wine after I had finished.  I peeled and sliced the beet and fried the chips in peanut oil until they were crispy...well I was shooting for crispy, mine were soggy.

 I then sauteed cauliflower florets in butter and white vinegar for the finishing garnish.  This is the finished soup...

The soup was a thicker, creamy soup and it was very flavorful.  The dish was pretty filling even though there was no protein.  The red beet chips were not that great.  I may should have sliced the beet chips a little thinner to allow for them to crisp up during the frying process.  The soup wasn't that difficult to make and the recipe could be adapted to use different types of vegetables.  I mean let's face it, if you put enough heavy cream in anything, it's going to be good.

 The banana bread pudding was a strange recipe.  I'm still not convinced that I didn't mess something up.  I started out by making a custard over the stove of milk, cream, and sugar.  I toasted bread slices in the oven and submerged them into the custard in a pan.  The way the recipe read you basically have one layer in the middle and the custard all the way around the pan.  It called for a 9 x 13 baking pan but only a layer of two slices.  The bread pudding recipes in the past that I have tried called for cubed bread that filled the whole pan.  I basically ended up with two banana sandwiches submerged in a baking dish of custard.  It looked odd.  Nonetheless, I baked the dish in the oven for about an hour and fifteen minutes until it looked like the custard was set.  Into the fridge it went for six hours.  After refrigeration, I had to cut the dish into squares and then reheated the squares in butter over the stove...kind of like french toast.

I was very skeptical of this dish.  It was messy and the pan of bread pudding looked awful.  However, after cutting out two squares to actually warm in the butter, it didn't look half bad.  The dessert was pretty tasty as well, kind of a cross between bread pudding, banana pudding, and french toast.  I think I just totally misunderstood something in the process.  It was so unappealing looking that I will just post a picture of the finished dish!

I know I cheated a bit this week.  I promise a protein next weekend!

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