Recipe: Roasted Cauliflower with Cranberry Sweet & Sour Sauce

Despite our truck and restaurant focus on the best locally sourced small farm ingredients, we still love the gloppy, greasy, thoroughly inauthentic (although authentically Americanized Chinese, but we digress) Chinese takeout experience every once in a while. Like over the weekend, when it was about 20 degrees and all we wanted to do was eat crab rangoons and General Gao's chicken and sit on the couch and watch back to back Harry Potter movies.

Yes that happened, and it was awesome, and the best guilty pleasure meal. But we try not to do it too much - because it's not super healthy, because we try to cook often, because we want to avoid processed foods and industrial meat for the most part. And that's part of how our sauce line came about. We wanted to be able to eat Chinese flavors that we know and love at home in an easy and accessible format, but also to be able to feel good about the ingredients. We like knowing where the ingredients came from and that the sauce wasn't made with an abundance of sugar or salt or oil or all the tricks that often make fast food taste so good.

So we're really proud of this Cranberry Sweet & Sour sauce. It's made with organic cranberries from Fresh Meadows Farm in Carver, MA. And while it's got a sweet side as well as a vinegary kick, it's not loaded with preservatives or chemicals or anything else you can't pronounce. All natural, gluten free, vegan, all the good stuff. 

And we wanted to make it super easy. So I made roasted cauliflower and just poured the sauce on and mixed. So good. It's barely a recipe, but details below. Let us know if you tried some and what you did with it, we'd love to hear!

1. Take one head of cauliflower and cut into pieces. Don't forget the stalk! I sliced it into thin pieces, cutting off any hard or woody bits and added it to the pile of florets. You can also use the leaves if they're in good condition (not wilted or browned).

2. Put the cauliflower on a lightly oiled sheet pan in the oven at 400 degrees. I left it in for about 20ish minutes, I think. To be honest, I'm not sure. Just check after about 15-20 minutes and pull the tray out when you get nice browned bits and crunchy edges. 

3. Put into a bowl and toss with a drizzle of cranberry sweet & sour sauce! Add chopped scallions or fried shallots if you like. Eat with some steamed rice if you want. Enjoy!