Yesterday’s dinner was really neat. Everything we made had a bizarre not-homemade quality to it; the flavors and textures seemed like the type that would only occur in a restaurant.

A couple weeks ago we tried to make this cauliflower soup recipe that Toby found on a blog. We were skeptical of yet another pureed vegetable soup recipe (these get kind of old after a while), but it seemed so weird that we had to try it. It had basically no ingredients except for cauliflower and leeks, and unfortunately it was as boring and textureless as it sounds. (Leeks are good, but they couldn’t rescue this.) I did salvage my bowl of soup by adding sriracha, which totally changed the dish, but we will not be making pureed cauliflower soup again. (This seems so obvious in retrospect.)

Why am I talking about the failed soup? Well, we were determined to give cauliflower a second chance. Slow-roasted cauliflower with pounded anchovies was the perfect thing to try.

To make this, you roast big chunks of cauliflower forever in lots of olive oil, and you make a ridiculous sauce of lemon juice, raw garlic, and anchovy. The sauce is essential, by the way. The photo above shows only the cauliflower, with some parsley as garnish. Without the sauce, you have beautiful cauliflower with a very nice texture. With the sauce you have something AMAZING!

We will certainly be making this again.

The main course was the cauliflower along with a merguez sausage from Sea Breeze Farm, home of amazing sausages and fancy meat in general. Toby made a sauce of leeks, white wine and olives to go on top of the sausage. I couldn’t get a good picture of the sausage, so there isn’t one here.

For dessert I made some outrageous Olive Oil and Coconut Brownies from the NY Times. These are incredibly gooey (much more than in the picture on the website), but also extremely delicious. These taste very special to me as well; I can’t believe I made them. It’s probably the salt sprinkled on at the end, together with the gooey texture and the crispy coconut. Mmm.