Cauliflower dreamin' on a winter's day ...

To say our recipe testers didn't care for this week's dish would be putting it mildly.

One called it cream of crap. Another threw the whole pot out after an hour or so of chopping and simmering, and made an entirely new dinner for herself and her family.

The dish? Cream of cauliflower soup from "Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites" (Clarkson Potter, $25.95). Recipes come from members of the Moosewood Collective, a group of employees and friends of the well-known vegetarian restaurant of the same name in Ithaca, NY.

Now, Moosewood has a few cookbooks, and I can't help but notice that many of the recipes call for large quantities of my favorite things — cheese, eggs and butter.

But this book is different. It was a Christmas gift from my mom, a vegetarian and avid gardener. It pretty much embodies the way she cooked for our family when I was growing up — fresh, healthy and full of flavor. No wonder I'd sneak out to Taco Bell when I was a teenager.

Seriously, I love this kind of food. And I sigh when I think of soup simmering on the back burner for hours on a rainy day, which is why I chose the cauliflower soup.

Shopping was, well, inconvenient. That week, I chose to go to the store that carries my kids' favorite kind of granola bars. For some reason, this store doesn't sell whole heads of cauliflower (it has pre-cut florets in bags), and it doesn't carry ground mustard or caraway seeds, either. So, to store No. 2 I went.

When it came time to make the soup, on a drizzly Sunday, the kids were nuts after being cooped up in the house all morning. The minute I took the ingredients out for a nice, leisurely soup-making experience, they began chasing each other around the house pretending to be animal rescuers, à la Dora and Diego.

I chopped one onion and almost cut off my hand when a rescuer zoomed past me at top speed. I used the food processor to chop the rest of the vegetables and everything went quickly.

Simmering didn't seem to take as much time as I expected, either. Pretty soon, it was time to blend in the buttermilk, which I did with an immersion blender.

The result? A somewhat chunky, orange (from the carrots) and gold (from the onions and celery?) soup. It was more like a vegetable purée than a main dish, but maybe that's because I used the food processor instead of chopping the vegetables by hand.

I finished the soup off with a bunch of kosher salt and — yes, I know it's not low-fat — about a quarter of a stick of butter.

I liked the soup. Sure, it was simple, but you could really taste each vegetable, especially the cauliflower. The lemon juice and dill brightened it up, and the caraway added some depth of flavor.

I can see how it wouldn't appeal to some people, though. It's not very creamy or substantial, and it calls for a lot of chopping, especially for something that's not a main dish. You'll need a hefty sandwich, or a least some bread and cheese, to make it a meal.

Bee staff writer Kerry McCray can be reached at 578-2358 or at kmccray@modbee.com.

This soup was easy to make. But it took almost two hours for the carrots and cauliflower to simmer to tender enough to blend smoothly. I didn't use caraway seeds and I substituted 2 cups of milk and a tablespoon of vinegar for the buttermilk. Everyone liked it. We decided it would make a great Lenten soup supper with some bread and fruit. My 3-year-old asked for seconds, and even the baby liked it. My boys liked it better after tossing in some crumbled bacon.