Roasted Cauliflower and Sweet Onion Kugel

Passover.  Its not something I ever thought of as a child.  Its not part of my family heritage nor that of most of the other kids I grew up around.  In college I became friends with a girl who happens to have a mixed heritage – she’s in the process of exploring it now and after spotting this recipe I was thinking of her.  Its always wonderful to have an excuse to re-visit old, joyful memories.

I was excited to make this dish and it certainly didn’t hurt that the dish itself is extremely healthy and easy to put together!  The only trouble I had was with the matzo meal.  Its not something I had worked with before (and I still haven’t since I was afraid that I would not be able to use it all before it went bad.)  so what is matzo meal?  Think bread crumbs but instead of crumbs of bread, they are crushed matzo – essentially unleavened bread.

Making this dish, I went off the script a bit.  I didn’t mean to for the most part.  I didn’t coat the veggies in honey then roast them for a bit longer.  Those directions got a little lost since the ingredients were a bit out of order.  I’m curious how much this affected the outcome but I’m pretty sure the only thing the honey would have done was to speed the browning of the veggies.  That’s simply what sugar does in the oven.  The other thing I did was switch out matzo meal for crushed saltines.  It increased the salt in the dish but you can’t tell.  At least I couldn’t.  There were two reasons for doing this: 1. I had saltines handy and 2. I was afraid that if I went and bought matzo meal, I would only use it for this purpose.  If you have matzo meal, please use it but this change made the dish accessible to me!

 

Its disappearing fast!

Ingredients:

1 large onion

1 head of cauliflower

3 T olive oil
1/2 t salt
1/2 t pepper

1 T honey

1 T dill seeds, finely ground in herb grinder (orig recipe called for 3 T fresh dill)

2 T parsley flakes (orig recipe called for 3 T fresh parsley)

1/2 c matzo meal (or substitute in saltines)

4 large eggs, beaten

Process:

1. Pre-heat oven to 450F.  Rough chop the onion (I broke mine down to 8 chunks) and break the cauliflower head into florets and slice the stalk into 1/4 in pieces.  Place onto baking sheet and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper.  Roast for 25 min then remove and chop into small pieces.*

2.Mix the dill, parsley and matzo meal.  Pile on the chopped veggies, honey** and eggs.  Mix until combined then transfer to a well greased baking dish.  The one I used was approximately 8″x12″x4″ (wxlxh).  Bake for 35 minutes and serve.

* The original recipe says to do this in a food processor but I simply sliced the florets and chopped the stems up slightly as necessary.

**The original recipe calls for the honey to go onto the roasted veggies then the veggies go back into the oven for 5-10 minutes until tender and fully browned.  This is probably great if you’re planning on making this meal as a prep ahead dish but since my veggies were still warm when they went into the greased baking dish, they started to cook almost immediately.  They still had some bite to them after the second bake but any more cook time would have likely ended with mushy vegetables.