Roasted Garlic Cauliflower Mashed “Potatoes”

It’s never too early to talk about Thanksgiving food… 

Ask anyone what their favorite dish on the Thanksgiving menu is and you’ll probably hear, “mashed potatoes.” Who doesn’t love the creamy, buttery pile of cloud-like spuds? Between the potatoes, stuffing, cornbread, and dinner rolls, this Thanksgiving meal is a carb bomb waiting to go off! It’s also likely to put you into a post-meal food coma!

In hopes of lightening up the Thanksgiving meal, and without sacrificing flavor, we hopped on the cauliflower bandwagon and came up with our version of mashed potatoes. Except that there’s no potato in the recipe. Yes, you read that right!

The idea to substitute a non-starchy vegetable for the potato is brilliant, as it lowers the overall calories while increasing the nutritional value. Frankly, you can make this recipe with lots of different veggies – carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, broccoli, butternut squash – or combinations of these.

What we’re saying is that you can make this recipe any time of the year and you will never get bored of it.

Our trick is to roast the veggies first in order to caramelize the natural sugars and make the dish a little sweeter to balance out the natural pungency of some of these veggies.

Roast up some onions, shallots, or garlic along with the veggies, and then puree them all together with some low-sodium vegetable broth and a bit of Parmesan cheese (or nutritional yeast to keep it dairy-free). This combination will yield a product that is both creamy and delicious. You won’t even miss the potatoes!

Of course, you can “take it up a notch” and add some chopped bacon (everything’s better with bacon), chopped chives, and a couple of tablespoons of your favorite grass-fed butter or ghee. Yep, that’ll do.

This is a comfort dish turned guilt-free! Let us know if you try this recipe with any other vegetables.