Cauliflower gets the Marbella treatment in this satisfying sheet-pan dish

Cara Mangini has heard the question before: If I eat this vegetarian meal, will I end up still hungry?

The question would sometimes come up when she’d serve an entirely plant-based menu for catered corporate events. Some attendees would invariably be worried; unlike at a restaurant, they wouldn’t have a choice. But Mangini’s answer, told definitively through her Little Eater catering company and her cookbooks, is a resounding no.

Those worried attendees, she told me in a Zoom interview from her office in Columbus, Ohio, would approach her after the meal to confess their anxieties - and their surprise. “I’ve never felt more full and satisfied and energized,” they would tell her.

Mangini seems to possess an unerring knack for putting together the kind of plant-based dishes people love, and for teaching readers to do so, too. In her new book, “The Vegetable Eater” (Workman, 2024), she offers what she calls a “playbook” to help people “learn foundational techniques to reimagine and reinvigorate your repertoire,” she writes in the introduction. She organizes the book around “essential dishes, mostly familiar-sounding ones” such as pizza, burgers, pasta, chili, tacos, grain bowls and more, providing three recipes for each dish that vary with the seasons.

Whenever I hear the idea of a cooking “repertoire,” I perk up, because I’ve long believed that one of the mistakes many of us make when trying to get regular dinners on the table is going for so many new things all the time. That might sound strange coming from someone whose job involves writing recipes for new things all the time (and supervising others who are doing likewise), but the best, most efficient home cooks I know make many of the same meals regularly, perhaps with variations on the themes. If one of my or my colleagues’ recipes becomes one of those meals, I’m thrilled, of course.

Mangini comes to her writing from a teacher’s perspective, honed not only by her restaurant cooking experience, but also by her work as one of the original “vegetable butchers” at the Italian market chain Eataly. Her first book, “The Vegetable Butcher,” focused on, as you might imagine, cutting and prepping techniques that can help make cooking vegetables more second-nature.

In “The Vegetable Eater,” Mangini again offers a slew of prep tips, but her mission has expanded. “Once I get people to the place where it doesn’t feel like such a task to break down broccoli,” she told me, “I can help them find back-pocket recipes to cook on the fly.”

These days, with food “hacks” proliferating on social media - some of them more useful than others - I appreciate Mangini’s sensibility. There’s nothing particularly showy about the ways she suggests you prep vegetables; they’re just common-sense approaches that might not have occurred to you.

Take the way she breaks down a head of cauliflower, one of my go-to vegetables. Rather than trying to cut the core out in one piece, she first quarters the cauliflower from stem to crown, rendering the core easy to dispatch with four angled slices. It’s all florets from there.

Now what do you do with it? Well, Mangini likes to riff on familiar dishes, and this one is a take on the famous chicken Marbella from “The Silver Palate Cookbook.” She turns the meaty braise into a sheet-pan dinner, keeping the crucial marriage of chile heat and a sweet-and-sour, wine-based bath. This is not one of those sheet-pan recipes that require you to work in stages, pulling things off and on the pan so they’re done simultaneously. No, it’s a one-sheet deal, with just one interruption for stirring and to scatter on some pine nuts.

Mangini also offers instructions for simultaneously roasting polenta rounds to serve as the base for the cauliflower, but I kept things even simpler. I want to leave the choice of grain flexible, making it all that much easier for you to decide how - and when - to fit it into your own repertoire.

Sheet Pan Cauliflower Marbella

The classic chicken dish from “The Silver Palate” cookbook gets a modern remake with cauliflower and a sheet pan while retaining its sweet, sour and slightly spicy essence. Layer the cauliflower with onion, chile, olives, currants, capers and oregano, then toss it with oil and vinegar, sprinkle it with a little brown sugar and bathe it in white wine. To make the prep go faster, add the cauliflower, onion, serrano and garlic to the sheet pan as you chop them, rather than getting everything ready in advance. Serve with your favorite cooked grain.

Storage note: Refrigerate for up to 4 days.

One (2-pound) head cauliflower

1 medium yellow onion (8 ounces), halved and thinly sliced

1 serrano or jalapeño (optional), stemmed, seeded and chopped

3 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced

½ cup pitted green olives, rinsed, drained and halved

1/3 cup dried currants (see Substitutions)

2 tablespoons drained capers

1 tablespoon dried oregano

½ teaspoon fine salt, plus more to taste

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

2 bay leaves

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon sherry vinegar

2 tablespoons light brown sugar

½ cup dry white wine, such as pinot grigio (see Substitutions)

¼ cup raw pine nuts (see Substitutions)

Cooked grain, such as barley, rice or farro, for serving

Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 450 degrees.

Quarter the cauliflower lengthwise, from crown to stem end, then remove the core of each piece at an angle. Use your hands or a knife to break apart the florets into bite-size pieces. Chop the upper part of the core into bite-size pieces; discard the end if it’s dry. Transfer to a large sheet pan.

Add the onion, serrano, garlic, olives, currants, capers, oregano, salt, pepper and bay leaves to the pan. Drizzle with the oil, then the sherry vinegar, and use your hands to toss and evenly coat everything. Spread the ingredients out on the pan, lifting the onions and currants toward the top as much as possible (without obsessing). Sprinkle with the brown sugar, then pour the wine into the pan, directing it mostly in between the cauliflower pieces.

Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the cauliflower starts to turn golden in places.

Remove the sheet pan from the oven and scatter the pine nuts over the top. Carefully flip and stir the mixture, then spread out in the pan. Roast for another 5 to 10 minutes, or until the cauliflower is nicely browned and tender. Taste, and season with more salt as needed.

Transfer the cauliflower mixture to a large platter or individual plates, and serve with the grain of your choice.

Substitutions:

Have access to Romanesco, the green, pyramid-shaped cousin of cauliflower? Use that instead.

Don’t like chiles? Omit the serrano or jalapeño.

For sherry vinegar, you can use white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar.

To make this alcohol-free, use another 2 tablespoons vinegar plus 2 tablespoons water instead of the wine.

Instead of currants, you can use raisins, chopped dried apricots or prunes.

Instead of pine nuts, you can use pumpkin seeds, pistachios or slivered almonds.

Note: If you’d like to serve this over roasted polenta planks (from a store-bought tube), brush them with oil and roast them on another sheet pan for the final 5 to 10 minutes of the cauliflower mixture cooking time.

Serves 4 (makes about 7 cups)

Nutritional Facts per serving (1¾ cups) | Calories: 380; Fat: 22 g; Saturated Fat: 3 g; Carbohydrates: 38 g; Sodium: 713 mg; Cholesterol: 0 mg; Protein: 7 g; Fiber: 8 g; Sugar: 24 g

– Adapted from “The Vegetable Eater” by Cara Mangini (Workman, 2024).