Cauliflower and romano cheese cookies
Ingredients:
200 gms raw cauliflower florets, steamed lightly
50 gms romano cheese grated 100 gms raw peanuts (or almonds or walnuts)
½ tsp baking soda l Butter to grease the pan
A bowl of water to clean your fingers, and a towel to dry off.
Salt to taste
Method:
Pulverise the peanuts (couldn't resist the alliteration) in a food processor and once they're nice and crumbled, say, the consistency of breadcrumbs, kind of, toss in all the other ingredients and spin all of it around. It's nice to have something to chew, so don't make it too mushy.
Taste to see if it's to your liking. Unlike sweet cookie dough, this 'raw' tasting may not be a great experience, but visualise the end product, all cooked and crispy. You may need to adjust for taste - according to what you like. More cheese? More salt?
Roll out the dough as thinly as you can and then using a cookie cutter or the cap of a bottle, make cookie-like discs. You'll need to pat them down so the shape is even.
When you're doing this, you'll need to rinse off your fingers each time you press a cookie down, so it doesn't mess up the next one. Keep the bowl of water and towel handy to dry off. It's important to be neat at this stage, since the end product will look messy if you rush it.
Sometimes we just use our palms to flatten out the cookies for a home-made look. Rinsing our fingers and drying them off each time, we plop the cookies on the baking sheet and the result is very nice too.
Grease a baking tray and lay out the cookies, spaced apart, and bake till brown on one side. It should take about 15 minutes in an oven heated to 150°C. Flip them over gently till the other side is brown too. Be careful when flipping so they don't break.
Remember that this isn't real dough and you have to treat the cookies like they're porcelain until they've crisped. o It's nice if a few of them are crunchy so you may want to experiment with how long you leave it in the oven, since there are so many variables like oven temperatures and altitude and so on.
Take the cookies out of the oven and allow them to cool (they'll harden as they cool) before you store them in a jar, carefully placing them in, so they don't crumble.
