A Spiced up Side Dish

For the past year (or rather since Pinterest came along and made it easy for me to find stuff) I've been really trying to shake things up on the meal front at home.  I've been trying new recipes, some are hits (most of them) and some are misses.   However for the past few months I've been slacking off and resorting to my quick and easy go to recipes.  Blah, blah, blaaaa....   So last week I got myself back on track and the boys are grateful (so am I).  New stuff is fun to try!  So I'm going to post four adaptations to some recipes I found on Pinterest (and links to the original versions) and then tried in my kitchen.

This is a photo I found online that best represents what my end result looked like.  Mine were  slightly crispier

The first up on the docket was a side dish.  Side dishes are the bane of my existence.  I've been trained conditioned to believe that every meal should have a side.  And frankly, side dishes are relatively boring (in my opinion).  So once I stumbled across this recipe I thought I'd give it a go.  I did things a teeny tiny bit different than the original recipe at Little Grazers called for and I'm really happy with the end result.  I've posted a picture of the Cauliflower Cheese Bites (because everyone needs a photo right?) that I found online that best represented what my end result looked like, because I honestly forgot to take a photo of the end result for my experiment.  Mine were much crispier and flatter than these ones in the photo - almost like a thick sliced chip.  I also like my things extremely well done, so I'm sure that played a role in the different appearance as well.

So here we go:

Cauliflower Cheese Chips 

Ingredients

• Half a head of cauliflower
• 1/4 tsp of nutmeg (you could probably omit if you hate nutmeg)
• 1 cup of old cheddar (though any age would be fine - pick a flavour you like)
• 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese (I just used the kind that comes in a can and you keep in your fridge - but you could you the fresh kind too)
• 1 egg
• pepper
• 1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes (for a little kick - you could omit this though)

**Adjust cheese if you don't like it as much as my family does. I always get yelled at for not having enough cheese in my recipes, so I added more.

Directions

1. Boil cauliflower in a pot of water with some salt added.  Boil until softened.  
2. Drain cauliflower well and mash up (you can use a fork, I used a hand mixer thingamajig) until you have small grains.  Set aside to cool. 
3. Preheat your oven to 400f
4. In a bowl mix your cheeses, nutmeg, red pepper flakes, pepper and egg.  Combine with your warmed cauliflower.  It's probably easiest to mix it using your hands.  
5. Make little balls and place them on a greased baking tray (however I used a silicon baking tray without grease and it worked perfectly).  Flatten them down with the back of a spoon.  
6. Place the pan in the oven and cook for 30 - 40 minutes (depending on your oven and how crispy you would like them).  You will have to flip them half way through your cooking time.  

That's it!  It's really that easy.  And they were crunchy and delicious.  Thanks to Little Grazers for the original inspiration.  Go check them out, you'll find some amazing recipes on her page.