Diet Friendly Fast Food

(Updated with better photos and step-by-step instructions, March 2014.)  Have you heard that cauliflower is the new trendy vegetable for 2014?  I don't know who decides these things, but personally I'm kind of excited to see a versatile and low-glycemic vegetable like cauliflower getting the spotlight!  My love for cauliflower is well documented in the recipe archives, but there are quite a few of my early cauliflower recipes that can really use a photo update, like this amazing way to cook cauliflower I posted in 2006 when I was infatuated with Mark Bittman's wonderful book The Best Recipes in the World.  In this recipe with Tuscan origins, the cauliflower is briefly simmered, then sauteed in a generous amount of olive oil that's been seasoned with garlic and finished with both lemon zest and lemon juice.  This is a pretty garlic-flavored dish, which was fine with me. But if you're not sure how much you like garlic, or if you're planning a romantic evening, you might want to reduce the amount of garlic.

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.   This Easy Garlic and Lemon Shrimp couldn't be more simple to make, but the taste is special enough that you can serve it for any kind of occasion.)

I grew up in a family where my father loved shrimp and my mother hated them, and it was a sign of how much my mom loved my dad that periodically she would heat up a big pot of oil and make deep-fried shrimp for Dad and the other family members who liked it.  I was always daddy's girl, so I loved everything my father ate, including rare steak, Roquefort dressing on salad, onion sandwiches, and shrimp of any kind.  When you splurge on big shrimp like these (called prawns in many places) there are many good ways to serve them, but I loved this simple recipe of shrimp sauteed with minced fresh garlic and then served with lemon juice and lemon zest added at the very end.