Mashed potatoes are sort of the best food ever. I've always been in love with mashed potatoes. I have to try pretty hard to remember how the mashed potatoes my dad used to make tasted, but I can kind of still remember, though it's been years since I've eaten them. They were great, anyways. However, they taste nothing like my go-to mash-up these days, which also tastes great. Mashed food is awesome. My mashed potatoes has evolved, as many of my favorite dishes have, over the past couple of years. I used to load them up with dairy stand-ins, like tofutti cream cheese and earth balance. And they were good. But sometimes you can't even taste the potato. And I like the way potatoes taste! This is a sort of straight-up vegetable mash recipe, but try it and tell me you don't get what I mean when I say they taste potato-y in a way that you'd never understand from eating mashed potatoes from a restaurant.

Do you ever have those days where nothing seems to go right?

Like if you really really wanted to make flatbreads with a cashew veggie spread and thought about making them all day at work, then came home, knowing you had everything you need in your fridge, then got half-way through making them and realized you didn't have one essential ingredient?

You were then forced to fly by the seat of your pants and come up with plan b. 

What do you do when life gives you pizza dough?

Make pizzette of course!

So the original plan was flatbreads, as you know, but once I had a food processor full of veggies and cashews, I reached to the back of my fridge for my tofu, and it was a frozen solid block. The spread isn't much on its own, not to mention proteinless (cashews aren't quite enough), so I scrapped it. I had pizzette on my "to test" list under the appetizer category and hadn't made any pizzette in a while, so since I had pizza dough at my fingertips, I thought I'd test a recipe I had jotted down earlier in the week. It was called "Pizzette with caramelized onions and barbecued artichokes." Sounds great, right? So I reached into my fridge and grabbed a full jar of artichoke hearts packed in water, for my barbecuing pleasures, and twisted. Nothing happened. I twisted and I twisted until my hands couldn't twist anymore. The boyfriend met the same end to the jar of artichokes. As posted on instagram, "All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't open that freaking jar of artichokes." And now we're looking at plan C. 

Cauliflower.

I have been seeing people buffalo it like crazy lately, and have been wanting to try it. Why not put a practical twist on the buffalo and barbecue it? 

So I gave it a shot, by steaming first and then tossing in barbecue sauce. It ended up a little watery, making my lovely bite-sized pizzette a true barbecue experience because they became ridiculously sloppy. A quartered artichoke heart would be perfect. So someday, when I get my jar open, I will try again with the way I intended.