It's President's Day, which means no school, which means no work. I realized it had a been awhile since my last blog and no better day to cook and write than today. I asked for suggestions and thanks to all of my twitter followers I got staggering zero responses! So I texted my sister who has about 25 different ideas stowed away that she wants me to blog about and sure enough she got back to me instantly - requesting buffalo cauliflower bites. Being the Pinterest addict that I have become, I saw these a couple of weeks ago and thought they looked interesting. They are like little boneless buffalo wings sans the chicken. Any guy reading this may be wondering, what is the point? After all chicken is pretty much the star of buffalo wings. But for us girls, we are intrigued by this. Its all the taste of buffalo wings (well the idea of it anyway) with half of the calories. They are seriously easy to make and taste pretty awesome too!
First thing's first, get a head of cauliflower and chop it up into little bite sized pieces. I haven't worked with cauliflower all that much so I basically just treated it like broccoli. I cut off the stems and left the heads in various chicken-nugget-like sizes.
In a separate bowl, mix 1 C flour, 1 C water and 2 t garlic powder. This is the batter that you'll dip the cauliflower into. You'll notice it uses water rather than milk, keeping the fat and calories to a minimum. I didn't get a picture of this step because the dentist office called, but you just coat the cauliflower and put it on a greased cookie sheet. I used my silpats rather than greasing them and it worked great.
Bake them for 20 minutes at 450 degrees and they will look like this. Nothing special, just battered cauliflower. Take about 3/4 C buffalo sauce and 1 Tbsp melted butter (these are the only fat calories I swear) and mix them together in a bowl. Thoroughly coat the cauliflower with the sauce and then put them back on the cookie sheet to bake for another 5 minutes.
Serve them with celery sticks and some ranch or blue cheese (the light version of course) and you can fool just about anyone into thinking its chicken. Until they take a bite out of it. Although it doesn't taste like chicken, they really don't taste bad at all. In fact they taste pretty dang good. You still get the crispy outer shell and the spicy buffalo taste without the guilt. Give them a try, chances are you will be pleasantly surprised!
