Roasted Flowerets 🥦

^ Broccoli and Cauliflower

Broccoli and cauliflower are probably the most hated vegetables in my household. And by my household, I mean my wife. But in an effort to grow up and eat our vegetables more often — you know, so that our aging bodies do not collapse in our 50's — I devised an easy-to-make, appetizing dish out of cauliflower and broccoli🥦.

This happened round about the time I was learning how to make pizzas (more on that later). More importantly I grew really comfortable with ovens. To my surprise, I learnt that setting an oven to 400°F will essentially roast its contents ♨️.

All right then! I wore my mad scientist’s hat and gambled on a batch of broccoli and cauliflower flowerets. The idea was simple: process the flowerets in three steps:

• wash 🚰
• spice 🌶
• roast ♨️

💡tip: might be a good idea to pre-heat the oven at 410°F early in this 3-step process.

🚰 The washing step is pretty obvious: you do not want any sand or worms creeping in along side those flowerets. And its just a matter of good hygine.

🌶 The spice step is pretty simple, and hopefully obvious. Here’s what I do:

• I take a couple of baking trays and line them with baking paper (this ensures that washing the baking tray is less cumbersome later on).
• Next, I splash the baking paper with some olive oil. 🫒
• I then lay out the broccoli and cauliflower flowerets on the oiled baking paper. And splash some olive oil over the flowerets themselves.
• Once this is done, I sprinkle a generous amount of spices on the flowerets. I hit the spice rack for turmeric, red chili powder, salt, and ground black pepper — my basic set. If I am feeling particularly adventurous, I add some coriander, oregano or even freshly chopped thyme.

The result should start looking something like this:

🥦 Broccoli and cauliflower flowerets, in a baking tray, in the process of being spiced 🌶

♨️ Next up is roasting! Once spiced to your heart’s content, preheat the oven to 410 degrees (something you can do while preparing the flowerets — I usually forget this step). Once the oven is ready, put the tray(s) of flowerets in the oven for about 20 mins. They do not take a lot of time to roast. Let it stew in that heat for 30 mins if you want the floweret to come out crispy — just remember, the longer you keep them in the oven, the smaller and crispier they tend to get.

Essentially, you are looking for a nice golden bake on the cauliflowers and a partial browning of the broccoli.

The 30 minute, crispy version.

To mix things up you can throw in a bunch of bell peppers in with the flowerets, just to make the whole thing look more ‘colorful’.

A version with bell peppers. Notice the lack of a baking sheet: cleaning the trays was a pain.

And the whole process is effortless from a cooking stand-point. No standing near the stove, no over engineering with multi-step processes, no fine-tuned measurements. The whole thing is easy.

Between my wife and I, we usually roast about two tray-fulls if we plan on having it as a stand-alone dish. Sometimes we may eat it with bread — one tray is usually good for such occasions.

If you do happen to try this out, let me know how it goes!

Happy healthy, delicious eating!