Spicy Cauliflower

Burgers and ribs are all well can good, but sometimes we like to experiment with much different textures and flavors. Much like Liz Lemon's "I'm a flip flopper," we do our fair share of vegetarian meals in with all the delicious chicken fricassee and grilled paella.

This one was a quite unusual recipe we decided to give a try that's essentially like boneless buffalo wings - only with vegetables instead of meat, and with an agave dipping sauce rather than blue cheese. For this offbeat and non-traditional dinner, you'll need:

• 3 tbsp. Milk
• 1/4 cup Flour
• Garlic Powder 
• Salt
• 1/2 Head Cauliflower
• 2 tbsp. Butter
• Hot Sauce
• 1/4 cup Soy Sauce
• 1/4 Rice Vinegar
• 1/2 cup Peanut Butter
• Agave Syrup
• Lime
• Whole Ginger Root, grated

To get this started, we're going to pull the cauliflower florets apart and then cut them in half to make them bite sized and more manageable.

In addition to a batter, there will be two sauces to make - a spicy sauce to coat the cauliflower, and a sweet sauce for dipping to cool the burn! If you aren't familiar with that little brown guy next to the lime, that's what fresh ginger root looks like - you can usually find this in any given non-Walmart grocery store with the produce.

The cauliflower is first tossed in a light batter of milk, flour, garlic powder, and salt. There are lots of vegan recipes we've seen that just use water instead - we don't recommend going that route.

You could also go full monty the other direction and use your favorite onion ring / hush puppy / fish fry batter and fry these rather than bake them, but that sort of defeats the purpose of using healthy cauliflower in the first place. It's all about balance here!

For a fun variation, you could also pop in Parmesan cheese at this point for a flavorful crunch when the cauliflower is done baking, and then just skip the spicy sauce.

After being lightly battered we're going to put these on a baking sheet and pop them in a 450 oven for about 8 - 10 minutes.

Now its time to make the sauce. You can take this any flavor you want just by swapping out the base ingredients here. We went with butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and hot sauce. If you couldn't tell from the picture below, we put waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much hot sauce and ended up with something super spicy! Instead of buffalo, you could do BBQ sauce, teriyaki, or anything that sounds good to your palette.

The sauce gets whisked up and then reduced down over a low boil while the cauliflower bakes in the oven.

After starting to get golden brown, we pull these piping hot veggies out of the oven to get coated in sauce.

After being tossed in the buffalo sauce, return the cauliflower to the oven for another 2 - 3 minutes to finish cooking.

If you wanted to, you could totally dip these in any given ranch, blue cheese, or yogurt-based sauce (and we recommend you do!) but we went a bit weird and tried something different. Here Megan is mixing together peanut butter with rice vinegar, a dash of soy sauce, grated ginger, fresh squeezed lime, and agave syrup. The result is more Indian inspired and a much different experience than you'd typically have with buffalo wings.

Now it's time to serve up - toss some cauliflower bites on a plate with a side of dipping sauce and you've got either a vegetarian friendly finger food for a party, or a fun weeknight meal for a real change of pace!