Lemon Cauliflower Stir Fry Recipe (With Video)

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna do a cauliflower red pepper stir fry.

And I’m gonna do a little bit different seasoning just you can see that stir fry although it’s Asian cooking technique does not have to be done with Asian seasonings.

So what I’m gonna do is just put some paprika on this one and lemon so that it will be a little bit like a Spanish style flavor.

So what we’re gonna do, stir fry is very fast. You cook the vegetables very quickly on high heat so the benefit of these is that the vegetables are not exposed to heat for a long time and so they have less time to have their vitamins broken down and other nutrients. (Excuse me!)

Now what I’ve done is I’ve got my rice cooked on the back, you can put stir fry on anything. It doesn’t have to be rice. I just have some beautiful red rice that I thought that I would do tonight.

So, what your gonna start with is get your rice almost fully cook, stir fry will take about ten minutes and you wanna cut your vegetables up before you start heating up the pan.

I’m gonna get everything ready. I’m gonna cut up my cauliflower, I’m gonna cut up my peppers. I’m going to zest and juice my lemon and I’ve got my spices soothing out here ready to go.

So, I’ll start with the cauliflower, usually comes with some green around it. You just wanna chop that up, give your cauliflower a rinse and then when you cut it if you start from the center and cut out, you’ll have nice solid cauliflower pieces as suppose to just a bunch of little bits.

So what I mean is when you have something like this, if you cut it from the center, its stays as a nice cauliflower chunk. I like to cut these up bite size so that I can bite them.

Now the best that I keep the cauliflower and the pepper separate, they are going to go into the wok separately even though we are stir frying them very quickly.

Next I’m going to zest my lemon. Just take the very outer skin off; if you have a zester it’s very easy. You can use a grater, zesters are very cheap, I recommend picking one up.

Alright! Once you get all that zesty goodness off there, chop that lemon in half, get a strainer over your bowl that way you don’t have to pick the seeds up afterwards. Stick something in there! I use the zester; fork works well and give it a squeeze. This is a nice juicy lemon.

Alright! You want to make sure you wait until this wok is really hot. I’ve got this on medium high heat, its seven and my dial goes up to nine. If you have an electric or glass top stove, you wok should be a flat bottom wok. Round bottom woks are for gas stoves which I don’t have unfortunately.

So once it’s hot, you’re gonna put some oil in there and we’re gonna use very very little oil. It doesn’t really matter what kind you use even because we’re gonna use so little of it that you’re not even gonna taste it. That’s probably like half a teaspoon. And it’s gonna sizzle but make sure you don’t get any spray back.

Ok! Cauliflower goes in first because it takes longer to cook. Get the oil around the cauliflower and you want to keep it moving because this is so hot we don’t want the oil to be sitting around otherwise it’s going to oxidize, create free radicals, we don’t want that so keep it moving.

This is why you wanted to have a large wok even if you’re not cooking very much food because as you stir things are gonna fire around.

Alright! Once your cauliflower have gone a little bit of color in them and once it started to soften from that bright opaque white to a little bit of translucence then they’re getting their cook time and you can add the peppers.

Same things with the peppers, you gotta stir them. Ok and the pepper won’t take as long but you wanna wait until they soften up a little bit. Alright! So peppers have just softens and with peppers I go more by smell than by looks. When they start to smell very profusely then I’ve figured they’re done.

Ok and I’m gonna season this stuff now and I’ve got some paprika that I’ve sprinkled on here, go with however much you like. If you want to make it really spicy you can add some cayenne here as well.

I’m just gonna do some black pepper and some sea salt. And this is sea salt from my grinder which I have my sea salt mix with kelp. Brings more nutrients in and it also means I use less salt.

Ok! So get those vegetables coated in the seasonings. Keep on stirring and then the last stage of stir fry is where we add a little bit of water to steam the vegetables to finish off their cooking process and now because my lemon had so much juice in it I’m actually gonna use lemon juice for this.

So just pour a little bit down the side and this is kinda fun, it’s gonna sizzle and then it’s gonna steam. Add that up, it wasn’t enough and this is what finishes off the vegetables cooking.

So if the cauliflower, I think I’m actually gonna do that process twice so if you have a longer cooking vegetables like a carrot, you can do that twice. If you have a shorter cooking vegetables like peppers, you don’t usually want to do that because they are in here, they’re gonna get it anyway. Tough luck peppers.

Alright! So round two, now I’m gonna throw the zest in as well. Doesn’t sizzle much on the second time!

Alright! As soon as that moisture has evaporated you want to take this off the heat. Stop these vegetables cooking. It helps if you turn the burner off and then you’re ready to serve it. I’ve got my rice ready to go, might add a little bit of lettuce to this one.

Alright! So I’ve got some of my rice in a dish, spoon some of this stir fry on top and I did add some lettuce, that would be nice in this really fresh tasting stir fry to have a little bit of green lettuce.

So there you go! I hope you enjoy your red pepper and cauliflower stir fry. The recipe is at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.