RECIPE
December 3, 2018
Cooking on deadline:
Cauliflower Tots
By Katie Workman
The Associated Press
here is no question that cauliflower
has been having a long, popular
moment. I was already a cauliflower
fan, even a cauliflower lover, mostly favoring
sliced and broken chunks of cauliflower tossed
with a generous amount of olive oil, sprinkled
with a liberal amount of salt, and roasted to a
deep caramelized brown in a fairly high oven.
My family can eat a baking sheet of that before
dinner even hits the table.
But geez, once people started realizing you
could “rice” cauliflower — e.g., chop it into tiny
rice-sized pieces — it blossomed into a true
“thing.” It can be used in stir fries, pizza
crusts, risottos, meatloaves — anywhere
regular rice might appear, cauliflower is
edging its way in.
Now, cauliflower is taking over your tater
tot! The same general concept — finely
chopped and cooked cauliflower bits — is
showing up in the form of caulitots.
To start with, these are just plain delicious.
(The cheese does not hurt.)
Second, they are just plain fun.
Third, if you are among those parents
wondering how to get more vegetables into
your kids’ bellies, you may have found a go-to
solution.
You might even want to enlist a kid or two to
help you form the tots.
I’ve included some variations I’m planning
to add to the tots in the future: minced chives,
T
TOT TWIST. Pictured are baked Cauliflower Tots,
a recipe by Katie Workman. (Lucy Beni via AP)
chopped parsley, a pinch of garlic powder, or
chili powder or paprika. But if you make them
just as they are below, I’ll probably see you at
the next Cauliflower Fan Club meeting.
Katie Workman has written two cookbooks
focused on easy, family-friendly cooking,
Dinner Solved! and The Mom 100 Cookbook.
Cauliflower Tots
Servings: 4 (about 16 tots)
Start to finish: 40 minutes
2 1/2 cups cauliflower florets
1 large egg
1/3 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup Panko breadcrumbs
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 400º Fahrenheit. Oil a baking sheet, or line with parchment paper,
and set aside. Place the cauliflower florets with 1/2 cup of water in a medium saucepan,
cover the pot, place over medium-high heat, and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the
heat to medium-low and simmer until just tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and place the
cauliflower in a food processor. Pulse the cauliflower until it is in very small pieces,
essentially a grated, rice-like consistency.
Place the chopped cauliflower on a clean kitchen towel, roll it up, and twist and squeeze
it over the kitchen sink until you have removed as much moisture from the cauliflower as
possible.
Lightly beat the egg in a medium-size bowl. Mix in the cheddar, Parmesan, Panko, and
salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower and stir to combine. Scoop out rounded tablespoons of
the mixture, form them into cylindrical shapes, and place on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake for about 20 minutes, until the caulitots are golden and firm. Serve hot.
Nutrition information per serving: 117 calories (53 calories from fat); 6 g fat (3 g
saturated, 0 g trans fats); 68 mg cholesterol; 318 mg sodium; 9 g carbohydrate; 2 g fiber; 1 g
sugar; 7 g protein.
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 13
Dictionary.com chooses word
of the year: “misinformation”
Continued from page 7
ter it in the wild, and that could
ultimately help curb its impact.”
In studying lookups on the site that
trended this year, Dictionary noticed
“our relationship with truth is
something that came up again and
again,” she said.
For example, the word “main-
stream” popped up a lot, spiking in
January as the term “mainstream
media,” or MSM, grew to gargantuan
proportions, wielded as an insult by
some on the political right. Other
words swirling around the same
problem included a lookup surge in
February for “white lie” after Hope
Hicks, then White House communica-
tions director, admitted to telling a few
for President Donald Trump.
The word “Orwellian” surfaced in
heavy lookups in May, after a state-
ment attributed to White House press
secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
accused the Chinese government of
“Orwellian nonsense” in trying to
impose its views on American citizens,
and private companies when it de-
clared that United Airlines, American
Airlines, and other foreign carriers
should refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Macau as part of China in
public-facing materials, such as their
websites.
Misinformation,
Solomon
said,
“frames what we’ve all been through in
the last 12 months.” In that vein, the
site with 90 million monthly users has
busied itself adding new word entries
for “filter bubble,” “fake news,” “post-
fact,” “post-truth,” and “homophily,”
among others. Other word entries on
the site have been freshened to reflect
timely new meanings, including “echo
chamber.”
The company’s runners-up for the
top honor include “representation,”
driven by the popularity of the movies
Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians,
along with wins during the U.S.
midterm elections for Muslim women,
Native Americans, and lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and questioning
(LGBTQ) candidates.
But the rise of misinformation,
Solomon said, stretches well beyond
U.S. borders and Facebook’s role in
disseminating
fake
news
and
propaganda
in
the
Cambridge
Analytica scandal. The use of Facebook
and other social media to incite
violence and conflict was documented
around the globe in 2018, she said.
“Hate speech and rumors posted to
Facebook facilitated violence against
Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, riots
started in Sri Lanka after false news
set the country’s Buddhist majority
against Muslims, and false rumors
about child kidnappers on WhatsApp
led to mob violence in India,” Solomon
said.
Is disinformation or misinformation
at play in terms of the year’s most
prominent
conspiracy
theories?
Solomon noted proliferation on social
media over students in the Parkland
school shooting being crisis actors
instead of victims of violence, and over
a group of migrants from Honduras
who are making their way north being
funded by “rich liberals.”
Elsewhere in the culture, countless
podcasts and videos have spread the
absurd notion of a global cover-up that
the Earth is flat rather than round. The
idea of “misinfodemics” has surfaced in
the last several years to identify the
anti-vaccination movement and other
beliefs that lead to real-world health
crises, Solomon said.
There are distinctions between
misinformation and disinformation to
be emphasized.
“Disinformation would have also
been a really, really interesting word of
the year this year, but our choice of
misinformation was very intentional,”
she said. “Disinformation is a word
that kind of looks externally to
examine the behavior of others. It’s sort
of like pointing at behavior and saying,
‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misin-
formation, there is still some of that
pointing, but also it can look more
internally to help us evaluate our own
behavior, which is really, really impor-
tant in the fight against misinforma-
tion. It’s a word of self-reflection, and in
that it can be a call to action. You can
still be a good person with no nefarious
agenda and still spread misin-
formation.”
She pointed to “Poe’s law” in slicing
and dicing “misinfo” and “disinfo.” The
term, dating to 2005, has become an
internet shorthand to sum up how easy
it is to spread satire as truth online
when an author’s intent isn’t clearly
indicated.
The phrase is based on a comment
one Nathan Poe posted on a Christian
forum during a discussion over
creationism, in which he commented:
“Without a winking smiley or other
blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly
(sic) impossible to parody a Creationist
in such a way that someone (italics
used) won’t mistake for the genuine
article.”
Dictionary.com chose “complicit” as
last year’s word of the year. In 2016, it
was “xenophobia.”
What to do if one starts in yours: Never put water on a grease or oil fire. Keep a lid handy
when cooking. If a fire starts in a pan, turn off the burner and carefully slide the lid over the
pan to extinguish the fire. Don’t run outside with the burning pot. Keep a fire extinguisher
in the kitchen. If the fire continues, leave the home and call 9-1-1.
A Message from the Oregon Life Safety Team: A Coalition of
Fire Service, Community and Insurance Professionals