Roasted cauliflower

A crucial part of revamping my eating this year was breaking out of the broccoli-carrots-green beans rut and challenging myself to try out veggies that I've never really been into before. One of the biggest successes was cauliflower. I'm still testing out different ways of using it, but this has become one of my go-to meals this year.

Roasting vegetables in general has been a revelation - so easy, and the results are (almost) always yummy.

For the cauliflower, I usually break up a half a head, toss with about a teaspoon of olive oil and some salt and throw it in at 425 for about 40 minutes. You want to stir once or twice so that it all gets nicely charred. It's delicious. And despite the fact that it's really a tiny bit of oil, it somehow manages to hit that greasy fried food craving.

Occasionally I'll throw in a bunch of broccoli along with it, or zucchini (added to the pan about 10 minutes in), but most of the time I'll do the cauliflower for about 25 minutes and then add one of those frozen fish filets for the last 15 - 20 and there's dinner.

(Hint - the Gorton's salmon or tilapia filets are much better than their generic "fish" variety, though usually a little pricier.)

Quick ravioli with tomato sauce

I don't eat a ton of pasta these days, so I've found myself going through an unfun pattern w/r/t pasta sauce. To wit: cook pasta, open jar of sauce, use approximately 1/8 of it, cook more pasta, grab jar of sauce from fridge, realize it's been several months and the sauce is crusty and ugh and have to go back to the drawing board.

Waste of money, food and fridge space. Yay!

So this time I went a better route - threw together a quick sauce from scratch instead of popping open the jar. I've done this once or twice before and the end result is the same - why the hell do I ever buy sauce in the first place?

Super simple and easy. Sauteed garlic in olive oil, add a can of tomatoes* salt, pepper, stir and smush at a simmer for a few minutes. Add fresh basil and toss with pasta. I also browned some (Tofurkey) sausage and threw that in. OMG the yum. So fresh tasting and much more satisfying than bought sauce and really not that much more trouble.

(*I've heard that whole canned tomatoes have better flavor than diced. Something about extra additives they use to keep the diced from turning into mush. Diced is what I had, so diced is what I used. Maybe next time I'll try the whole ones. )