Come on down

Hello from a plane somewhere between Minneapolis and San Francisco!

I’ve been trying to write this post for a couple of days now, on trains and planes and more trains and planes, but then I wind up staring out the window or admiring the spectacularly bedazzled manicure job on the woman next to me or reading an entire Us Weekly over someone’s shoulder before passing out and suddenly coming to three hours later in a new city. Today, I will persevere! I will only read half of an Us Weekly over someone’s shoulder.

I’m eight days into nearly two consecutive weeks on the road for Delancey. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to be on book tour, even now that I’ve been lucky enough to do this three(!) times, but I think it’s fair to say that, for me, there’s no more heady experience. That really is the word: heady. To get to meet so many of you, to meet your moms and spouses and hear your stories and shake your hands, to look out on your kind faces while I’m reading, to see so many great independent bookstores, to make Vietnamese noodle salad with Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs and the gang of beauties at Food52, to share a billing with the great Francis Lam, to stay up too late, to see friends old and new and sleep on the most comfortable air mattress in the world and yes that is actually a thing that exists, to eat as many sour gummies as I want, to get a massage in Oklahoma City while an instrumental version of Guns n’ Roses’s “November Rain” (!!) plays on the massage therapist’s iPod – this is what I do it all for. Thank you.

It was the richest, craziest icing on the cake to learn yesterday afternoon that Delancey had made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. THANK YOU. AHHHHHHH

I listen to a lot of music and podcasts when I travel alone, and this time, I’ve finally taken my friend Ben’s advice and downloaded some episodes of WTF with Marc Maron. I highly recommend his interview with Lena Dunham in particular. I also re-listened to the Spilled Milk episodes on grilled cheese and popcorn, and even though I’ve heard the jokes and it’s totally dumb and embarrassing to listen to your own podcast, I laughed so hard that the woman next to me thought I was sobbing. I have also discovered that, when you’re on a train, speeding along a coastline or a forest or anywhere, what you should listen to is Fleet Foxes. And in the depths of my iPhone, I found a song that I hadn’t listened to for years, “The Golden State,” as sung by Eddie Vedder and Corin Tucker, and just when I didn’t think anything could make me more feeling-full and grateful for the events of the past week, it did.

I’m heading to Santa Cruz later this afternoon, and I’ll be reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz at 7:30 tonight. Come on down. And if you can’t make it, here’s where else I’ll be in the coming week:

Pleasanton, CA
Friday, May 16 at 12:00 pm
Towne Center Books, "Read It and Eat"
555 Main Street
Tickets are $32 and include lunch and a copy of DELANCEY. Reservations required.

San Francisco, CA
Saturday, May 17 at 12:30 pm
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, #42

Mission Viejo, CA
Sunday, May 18, beginning at 10:00 am
Books Are Better Shared
Norman Murray Community Center
Tickets are $25. Registration required.

Seattle, WA
Thursday, May 22 at 6:30 pm
Book Larder
4252 Fremont Avenue North

And there are a lot more events after that, but please click on over here for the full listing.

Oh, and of course, you can find Delancey at Apple iBookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, University Book Store, Books-A-Million, Powell’s, or an independent bookstore in your town.

xx

Our people

I’m typing this post from my cousin’s kitchen table in Oakland, California, where June and I are visiting for a family baby shower and have stayed long enough to eat four slices of red velvet cake, get stuck twice in rush hour traffic on I-80, and sniff every single rose in Rockridge while out walking the neighborhood at 6:49 in the morning, killing time before the rest of the family wakes up. We fly home tomorrow, and then, on Tuesday, I leap into that heady, unnerving thing called Publication Day, otherwise known The Day Your Copy of Delancey Will Finally Ship, If You Pre-Ordered It, or, The Day You Can Find It In Your Local Bookstore, If You Didn’t. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!

Maybe it’s all the sugar in that red velvet cake, but I can’t stop thinking about the spring of 2009, five years ago, about where I was and what was going on and how I felt when my first book came out. I didn’t know yet that we would open a restaurant - or I didn’t believe that we would, anyway. I didn’t know yet that we would have a child. I didn’t know anyone in these photographs.  Not! A! One!

And in that relatively small expanse of time, they’ve become some of our closest friends, our colleagues, our vacation collaborators, our co-conspirators in pancake breakfasts on Tuesday mornings, our people.

I was telling someone the other day that writing Delancey was something that I needed to do, that it helped me to understand the decisions that Brandon and I had made, and that the effort of trying to tell our story to someone else - to you - had helped me to understand the story for myself. But I think the best part of writing it was actually this: that I got a chance to recognize the friends, family members, and neighbors who helped us build the restaurant, and the cooks, servers, hosts, dishwashers, and bartenders, everyone who works alongside us in it. It’s their restaurant as much as ours.

I should stop now, before I get too sappy.

I hope to pop back in here before I hit the road, but in case I don’t make it: see you out there!  I can’t wait.

P.S. Oh and hey, if you can’t come to a reading/signing, you can still get a signed copy of Delancey (or, for that matter, A Homemade Life). University Book Store in Seattle will send you a signed, personalized copy of the book, AND they’ll ship for free in the US for all orders over $20 (and they’ll ship internationally, too). Hop over here for more information.

P.P.S. Brian Eno on the power of singing. Just because I love it. (Thanks, Lecia!)

Maybe he's right

This is the fifth granola recipe I’ve posted on this blog. Five. Five! Four more than anyone needs! I cannot be stopped! I’ve turned into your annoying great-aunt, the one who tells the same boring story about Eisenhower every Thanksgiving, over and over and over and over and over. I even have the requisite small crotchety dog and a banana-yellow Formica kitchen, circa 1960. My transformation is complete.

I’ve been making granola regularly, at least once or twice a month, for something like fifteen years. I’ve gone through several recipes and versions, from the lowish in fat - a tragic notion that, I now believe, goes against the whole concept of granola - to the intricately spiced, thoroughly nutted, and generously sweetened. For a while, this 2008 version was the recipe that I hewed most closely to. It’s simple, solid, and though it does involve chocolate, I don’t know, it still feels like a sensible breakfast to me.  (And I’ve decided that there are far more dangerous delusions to harbor.) Two years ago, I found the Early Bird recipe, and then I got on a roll with that. But before long, I started to wish it were less sweet, and then I made the batch size larger, and then I started making it without the seeds, because I never seem to have any, and before I knew it, my slow paring-down and tweaking had shaped it into something else entirely.



I wasn’t going to write about it - I will remind you: FIVE GRANOLA RECIPES - but Brandon keeps nagging, asking me if I’ve written about it and why not. He thinks it’s the best yet, and maybe he’s right. My mother is also hooked on it, so that’s something. It’s the only granola I’ve wanted to make for the past year, if not longer. It’s deeply toasty in a way that verges on savory, rich enough to make me look forward to breakfast but not too rich for everyday, and most importantly, it has the strange, mystical ability to make coffee taste even better than it already does at seven o’clock in the morning.

Like the Early Bird recipe - and like my friend Megan’s wonderful Marge Granola - I use olive oil for the fat component, because I like the savory quality it brings. In the sustained heat of the oven, its grassy, vegetal flavors mellow out, so there’s nothing remotely salad-y tasting going on in the finished granola; the olive oil just gives it a deeper complexity than other vegetable oils can. And while you could maybe use less oil than I do, I like that it’s satisfying enough to stay with me for a few hours, and I like the way the oil helps the oats and nuts to crisp and crackle. Do what you will.

Also like the Early Bird recipe, I don’t use any spices. I like to keep it quiet, to leave room for the gentle, warming flavors of toasted nuts and oats. I also use maple syrup as my sweetener, but unlike Early Bird, it’s the only sweetener I use. And while it does look and sound like a lot of maple syrup, it’s less sweetener per cup of oats than almost any other granola recipe I’ve tried. I should also add that I used to sort of choke when I thought about using anything more than a tablespoon of maple syrup at a time, because it’s so whoppingly expensive, but its flavor really does make a difference, a dusky sweetness. At Delancey, we mail-order maple syrup from Stannard Farm in Vermont, and it’s wood-fired(!), dark and very subtly smoky. The way I feel about it borders on the evangelical.

As for the dry ingredients, there are the usual rolled oats, and whatever combination of nuts shows up in my cabinets that day, and a decent dose of kosher salt, and always some big flakes of coconut, the kind that crunch like wafers. And I measure the oats and nuts by weight, so it’s easy to throw together quickly with no measuring cups and, YES! YES! GOD YES! fewer dirty dishes and spills. I’ve even managed to make a batch of this granola with June around, weighing and stirring and slipping it into the oven so fast that she hardly had time to get feisty and start hanging on my legs, yelling EEEEEEAT. I can’t say that about much else.

P.S. I wrote a lot of this post at Delancey, where "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" was playing on Spotify. And before that, it was "Uptown Girl." I don’t really have anything to say about that, other than yeeeeeeow, it was great.


Granola No. 5

You can use any nuts you like here – or even seeds, if you want to. That’s the beauty of measuring by weight: as long as you use about 400 grams in all, it doesn’t matter which nuts or seeds you use or how much of each. I most often use almonds and walnuts, which I coarsely chop, but I also like to throw in some pecans now and then.

About kosher salt, take note: I use Diamond Crystal brand, which is less salty than Morton. If you use the latter, you’ll probably only want to use about 1 ½ teaspoons.

600 grams (6 cups) old-fashioned rolled oats
100 to 150 grams (about 2 to 3 loose cups) unsweetened coconut chips
400 grams nuts (maybe 3 to 4 cups? see headnote), chopped if you like
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 cup (240 ml) maple syrup, preferably Grade B
2/3 cup (160 ml) olive oil

Position racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven, and preheat to 300. Line two rimmed baking sheets with parchment.

Measure the dry ingredients into a large bowl, and stir well. Add the maple syrup and olive oil, and stir to evenly coat. Divide the mixture between the two prepared sheet pans, spread it out, and bake, stirring the granola and flipping the pans once or twice, until golden brown, about 40 minutes. I generally check on the granola every 15 minutes as it’s baking, and I gauge its doneness by color: in particular, I’m looking for the coconut chips to toast and for the whole mixture to achieve nice, even browning.

Allow to cool completely, then transfer the granola to airtight containers. Eat with plain yogurt (my favorite), milk, or on its own. You can store it at room temperature for a couple of weeks, easy, but if you use it more slowly than that, consider freezing some of it.

Yield: I’ve never actually measured, but probably about 3 quarts.

April 23

In the time since you and I last spoke, I’ve been to New Jersey and back for my sister-in-law’s wedding and, in the name of research, have eaten a lot of New Jersey bagels and New Jersey pizza. It was hard. And while I continue to dig my way out of the giant to-do list that accumulated in my absence, I wanted to quickly remind you: tonight, a crew of musicians is performing original music inspired by my first book A Homemade Life. 8 pm! The Royal Room! 5000 Rainier Avenue South! Seattle! Come on out! The whole concept is one of the weirdest, best things I’ve ever heard of, and I can’t wait. I baked four Winning Hearts and Minds Cakes for the occasion - five, but we sort of accidentally ate one - and I’ll be there to sign books and talk a bit. High five, Bushwick Book Club! See you tonight.

P.S. I wrote a little post for the Bushwick Book Club blog in which I share what I’ve been reading and listening to lately and out myself as John Green fangirl.

That word is eat

June has mastered a new word, and that word is eat.  It’s one of many things I like about her.

 
Because Brandon works most nights, I get up with June most mornings. I have developed a condition that my friend Andrea calls Bionic Mom Hearing, so I sleep with earplugs and a pillow over my head. It’s a sight I think you would enjoy. But she manages to wake me up anyway (MAAA! MAAA!), so I get a bottle of milk from the fridge (prepared the night before, a small gift to my future self), retrieve her from her crib ("UP! UP!"), carry her across the hall to our bed, lie down and listen to her little mouth working at the bottle and feel sentimental for 2.5 minutes before she starts yelling for me to unzip her sleep sack ("OFF! OFF!"), help her climb down from the bed ("DIT DOW!"), and follow her down the hall in search of a book ("BUH! BUHHHH!"). She is a blur of hair.

I struggle to figure out how much to write about her here, or how to write about this weird new parenting gig.  For the first 32 years of my life, I didn’t think I wanted a child; I wasn’t even remotely interested until, very suddenly, I was. And now here I am, in the thick of it, seeing my everyday - and my cooking, because it’s the anchor of my days - through the lens of this very different life. So I’m feeling it out, I guess: how to write now, how to write in a way that Old Me wouldn’t be totally bored and annoyed with, while acknowledging that New Me is... a new me. I like the new me better than the old one, in ways that I never expected: I had no idea I could be so patient! Able to read the same book fifteen times without screaming! Willing to walk around with chewed-up graham cracker smeared on my coat! I also never expected to spend so much time thinking about applesauce, and more to the point, Judy Rodgers’s roasted applesauce.

I’ve written about Zuni Café at least a half-dozen times on this site, which strikes me as a lot for someone who grew up in Oklahoma and lives in Seattle. But because my mother’s twin sister Tina lived near San Francisco, where Zuni is, and because I spent a lot of time at Tina’s house as a kid, a teenager, and in college, I got to eat at Zuni Café a few times in my formative years, and I do think it formed, and informed me. Judy Rodgers’s cooking was simple, seasonal, understated, and somehow also bold, the flavors so spot-on, so confident, that they made a deep impression. In a lot of ways, The Zuni Café Cookbook taught me how to cook. You can imagine then, how thoroughly I had my mind blown out of my head when, four years ago, after I wrote about her polenta, Rodgers (Judy? Can I call her Judy?) sent me an e-mail. (!!!!) She passed away last December, but it makes me happy to know that June will eat in her restaurant someday, and that she’s growing up eating Rodgers’s excellent applesauce.




It’s basically impossible to make anything elaborate for breakfast when June is around. And that’s fine, really, because I was a cold-cereal person long before she showed up. So cold cereal it often is! Or, if I was a superhero the night before and made a batch of oatmeal, we’ll have oatmeal. Or, if I was a superhero a few nights before and made oatmeal, so that I could later be a superhero and make leftover oatmeal muffins, we’ll have leftover oatmeal muffins. And if not, I try to at least make sure there’s applesauce and plain yogurt.

I live in a state of many apples, so, I don’t know, I got into the habit of making applesauce. It feels wrong to buy it at the store when I can get good fruit at the market on Sunday and turn it into applesauce in barely half an hour. For a long time, I used a stovetop method (much like the one in this ancient post), and sometimes I added half a vanilla bean, which I like a lot.  But then Kristen Miglore, the genius behind Food52’s Genius Recipes column, wrote about Judy Rodgers’s roasted applesauce. Like most of Rodgers’s recipes, this one is dead-simple, but all about the details. It’s just apples, sugar, salt, and butter (and maybe apple cider vinegar, though I haven’t needed it yet), and the sugar amount is much lower than other recipes I’ve used, because oven-roasting helps to concentrate the apples’ sweetness. You peel and quarter them, toss them with a tiny bit of sugar and a tinier bit of salt, dot them with butter, and you’re mostly done. (The only tricky part, if you can call it that, is seasoning the apples, because you’ll do it to taste: you might use one teaspoon, or you might use two. As tricky parts go, it’s not tricky.) In the oven, the apples soften and caramelize at their tips, and they also dry out slightly, which I like, because it makes for a pleasingly chunky sauce, one that June can eat with her hands, if that’s how the morning is going.

In any case, making applesauce is one of those brainless tasks that I can do once a week, while having a glass of something after June is in bed and before we are in bed, and the next morning, when I hear her through the earplugs and the pillow and the sleep, I feel good for having done it.

P.S. Seattleites! Listen! Delancey and the Pantry are hosting a Friends of The Seattle Public Library cookbook sale on Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4.  There will be hundreds of cookbooks, priced as low as two bucks, and your support helps the library. Come! And in other news, The Bushwick Book Club has written songs inspired by my first book - I can’t believe I just typed that sentence; AWESOME - and they’ll be performing them at the Royal Room on April 23, at 8:00 pm. See you there?


Judy Rodgers’s Roasted Applesauce
From the Zuni Cafe Cookbook and Kristen Miglore’s Genius Recipes

3 ½ to 4 pounds apples (Rodgers uses crisp eating apples, like Braeburns, Pippins, or Galas; I used Pink Ladies)
Pinch of salt
1 to 2 teaspoons sugar, or to taste
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into slivers
A splash of apple cider vinegar, optional

Preheat the oven to 375 F.

Peel, core, and quarter the apples. Put them in a (ungreased) baking dish just large enough to hold them in a crowded single layer. (I find that a 9x13 dish is perfect.) Toss with a little salt and 1 teaspoon of the sugar. (Unless they are very sweet, in which case you might not need any sugar at all.) If they are tart enough to make you squint, use 2 teaspoons of sugar. Dot the apples with butter, cover tightly with aluminum foil, and bake until the apples start to soften, about 15 to 30 minutes. Remove the foil, raise the heat to 500 F, and return the pan to the oven. Leave the apples to dry out and color slightly, about 10 minutes more. When the tips of the apples are golden and the fruit is tender, remove the pan from the oven, and coarsely mash the apples. (You could use a potato masher, but I just use the back of a wooden spoon, and I leave mine very chunky.)  If you like, season the applesauce further with salt and sugar to taste, and then consider a splash of apple cider vinegar to brighten the flavor. (You can try a drop on a spoonful to see if you like it; I haven’t found that my applesauce needs it.)

Yield: about 3 cups of applesauce

Book tour, housekeeping, and you will now have Hole songs stuck in your head

My publisher tells me that finished copies of Delancey, hot off the presses, are due to arrive in their offices early next week. (!)

I have a lot of feelings about this, both of the excited and terrified varieties, because it means that the book will finally be done, donedoneDONE, but also that it’s too late to change anything about it, make it better, or otherwise obsess over it. It means that it’s no longer mine, in a sense. But on the upside, it soon will be yours!  It also means that you should grab a pencil and get out your calendar, because I’m taking this show on the road.

I’ll be traveling around, doing readings and signings - regrettably, not karaoke’ing Hole’s greatest hits - for a good chunk of May.  Brandon has to stay home and make pizza, and June has to stay home and work on her pronunciation of pizza, so I hope you’ll come out and keep me company. I got to meet many of you when my first book came out, and it was, by far, the best part of the whole book thing. I’ve been hoping that I would get to go on tour again with this book, and I feel so, so, so very lucky that I do. Please come say hello!

In the meantime, you can pre-order Delancey, if you feel sufficiently moved, at any number of places, like Apple iBookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, University Book Store, Books-A-Million, Powell's, or an independent bookstore in your area.

With no further ado, here is the tour schedule. (I’ll also post it, as well as any updates, in the "click here for events and whatnot" link in the sidebar.)

Seattle, WA
Tuesday, May 6 at 7:00 pm
University Book Store
4326 University Way NE

Oklahoma City, OK 
Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 pm
Full Circle Books
1900 NW Expressway

Tulsa, OK
Thursday, May 8 at 7:00 pm
Book Smart Tulsa
Fifteenth and Home
1512 East 15th Street

Washington, DC
Saturday, May 10 at 6:00 pm
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW

Brooklyn, NY
Monday, May 12 at 7:30 pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street

Wellesley, MA
Tuesday, May 13 at 7:00 pm
Wellesley Books
82 Central Street
Tickets are $10 and refreshments will be served.

Wayzata, MN
Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 pm
The Bookcase
824 East Lake Street

Santa Cruz, CA
Thursday, May 15 at 7:00 pm
Bookshop Santa Cruz
1520 Pacific Avenue

Pleasanton, CA
Friday, May 16 at 12:00 pm
Towne Center Books, "Read It and Eat"
555 Main Street
Tickets are $32 and include lunch and a copy of DELANCEY. Reservations required.

San Francisco, CA
Saturday, May 17 at 12:30 pm
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, #42

Mission Viejo, CA
Sunday, May 18, beginning at 10:00 am
Books Are Better Shared
Norman Murray Community Center
Tickets are $25. Registration required.

Seattle, WA
Thursday, May 22 at 6:30 pm
Book Larder
4252 Fremont Avenue North

Vancouver, BC
Monday, May 26 at 6:00 pm
Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks
1740 West 2nd Avenue
Tickets are $45 and include refreshments and a copy of DELANCEY. Reservations required.

Kirkland, WA
Tuesday, June 3 at 7:00pm
Parkplace Books
348 Parkplace Center

Portland, OR
Monday, June 9 at 7:30 pm
Powell's City of Books
1005 West Burnside Street

Olympia, WA
Tuesday, June 10 at 6:00 pm
Bayview School of Cooking
516 West 4th Avenue

Spokane, WA
Tuesday, June 24 at 7:00 pm
Auntie's Bookstore
402 W. Main

Olympia, WA
Thursday, September 18 at 7:30 pm
Olympia Timberland Library
313 8th Avenue SE


Happy almost-weekend.

P.S. Make yourself a Black Manhattan tonight! I had one last weekend, with Amaro Nardini in place of Averna, and I’m still thinking about it.

Call it a meal

We have reached the point in winter, or spring, or whatever it is, when even I am tired of making, eating, and talking about soup. I’ve been meaning to make a batch of vegetable and pearl barley soup for the past week, and I even forced myself to chop up everything the other night before bed, thinking it would inspire me to get on it the next morning, but, eh. Eh. I’d rather do what I did twice last week: throw a cauliflower in the oven, eat the whole pan, and call it a meal.

Roasted cauliflower! Old news! You know how to roast cauliflower. I know how to roast cauliflower. But here I am, talking up roasted cauliflower, because this particular version has become - just as Bon Appétit said it would - my new go-to. The recipe comes from the "BA Arsenal" section of the February 2013 issue, and it’s hardly even a recipe (which is, more and more, my favorite kind of recipe). You’ll probably have it memorized after the first read-through. And I’ll bet you have everything in the house already - except maybe the cauliflower, and that’s easy enough to remedy.

When I roast cauliflower, I usually just, you know, roast it: sliced cauliflower, olive oil, salt, boom. But Allie Lewis Clapp, food editor of Bon Appétit, apparently swears by the combination of cauliflower and onion, the former caramelized and the latter "just-this-side-of-burnt." (Color = flavor! Assuming, of course, that you don’t go too far and actually burn the onions, which I did once; see photo below.) To the cauliflower and onion, she suggests that you add a few sprigs of thyme and a few whole, unpeeled cloves of garlic, all of it slicked with some olive oil. Then you chuck it in a hot, hot oven, and after barely half an hour, the cauliflower winds up velvety, meaty, even rich, and the onions relax and soften into sweetness, and the garlic is tender enough to spread on toast, and a dark, savory, somewhat bewitching smell has filled your kitchen - or your entire house, if you’re me and your house is small and the exhaust fan doesn’t really work, even though it roars like the engine of a semi scaling a mountain pass. Then you grate some Parmesan over the whole pan, slide it back into the oven, and pull it out when the cheese has melted and crisped into crisp, lacy, frico-like webs and shards.

At this point, you could divide it between a couple of bowls, put a fried egg on top of each, and call it lunch. You could also divide it between four plates and call it a side dish.  You could toss it with pasta, probably, though I haven’t tried it, and serve it with more Parmesan. Or you could just eat it, period, which is what I’ve been doing. If you have any leftovers, they’re good at any temperature - even cold, eaten straight from a Mason jar while sitting in your car outside the pottery studio after class.

Happy weekend.


Parmesan-Roasted Cauliflower
Adapted from Bon Appétit and Allie Lewis Clapp

One word of caution: don’t slice the onions too thinly here, or they’ll be more likely to burn.  I’d aim for ½-inch-thick slices, if I were you.

1 head cauliflower, trimmed
1 medium onion, sliced
4 thyme sprigs
4 unpeeled garlic cloves
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Parmesan or Grana Padano, for grating

Preheat the oven to 425°F, and line a rimmed sheet pan with parchment.

Place the cauliflower on a cutting board, and slice it top-down into roughly 1/3-inch slices. Some of the slices will crumble, and that’s fine. Scoop all of the cauliflower into a large bowl, and add the onion, thyme, garlic, and olive oil. Toss well. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Arrange the mixture in a single layer on the prepared sheet pan. Roast, tossing occasionally, until the cauliflower is mostly tender, golden brown, and caramelized at the edges, 25-30 minutes. Take the pan out of the oven, and grate a generous amount of Parmesan over the vegetables. (The original recipe calls for ½ cup, but I didn’t measure mine; I just eyeballed it.) Return the pan to the oven, and continue to roast for another 5 or 10 minutes. You’re basically cooking it to eye: you want the cauliflower to be nicely caramelized, but you don’t want the onions to burn.

Serve hot or at room temperature.

Yield: 2 to 4 servings