Cauliflower

I made a cauliflower soup based on a recipe from the same book as yesterday. It was called a velouté. If you know what a velouté is, you`re one step ahead of where I was a few minutes ago. Of course I googled what a velouté is after I made this soup, which made me understand how important one of the ingredients that I left out is.

Wiki has told me that velouté is one of the `mother sauces`of french cuisine, consisting of stock (chicken, fish or vegetable), butter, flour and salt and pepper for seasoning. A velouté soup is a soup that`s been thickened with the same, plus eggs. The eggs are what I left out of my soup. Oops. In any case, it turned out pretty velvety, and tasty.

Here`s how my wanna-be velouté made it to the bowl:

- Roughly chop and steam a head of cauliflower

- Brown a medium sized onion with a tbsp of butter (the other day I learned that if you add salt to the onion, it won`t brown. The reason being that the salt sucks all of the moisture out of the onion, which it needs to brown. Don`t salt the browning onion!)

- Once the cauliflower is soft, drain, add the onion to the pot with a cup of stock (I used chicken today, thanks to J for running out and getting some, what would a soup blog be without stock!)

Blend these three things together with the handy dandy hand blender

- In a pan, melt 3 tbsps of butter. Add 3 tbsps of flour, and stir frequently until a nice golden brown. This takes about 15 minutes, keep stirring.

- Once the flour is golden, slowly add 3 cups of stock, while stirring. Add some seasoning (I just added lots and lots of pepper) and let simmer for 20 minutes or so.

Add the latter to the former, stir and serve. I didn`t do the egg part, so I`ll have to repeat this recipe at some point and let you know how that goes.

Pardon all of the backwards apostrophes, copying and pasting velouté has done something to my apostrophe-ing ability in this post