So. It’s a week post-Thanksgiving, and the leftovers are beginning to dwindle. The stuffing’s gone, the turkey’s almost out, the mashed potatoes didn’t even make it to Sunday. But what about the crudités?

[Yeah, crudités. This is a thing with other families too, maybe? My grandmother, for any big festive meal, likes to have a crudité platter, as well as sometimes a relish tray (by which we mean some gherkins and canned black olives that basically only I eat). And though in general I’m all about the veggies and dip, on Thanksgiving — the biggest day of the amateur competitive eating year — they just sit there unloved. Your family doesn’t have this weirdness, okay, but just go with my framing device for this post.]

So you have your basically-untouched crudités in the fridge, maybe getting nibbled at or thrown in a stirfy, what have you, but the cauliflower is just languishing because raw cauliflower is just the worst. (We have discussed this before.) I have one word for you: migas.

Migas literally means ‘crumbs’ in Spanish, and it’s an ancient dish in Spain of bread soaked in flavorful liquid, a means of using old, dry bread, much like French toast. In Mexico, the tradition morphed to use fried day-old corn tortilla strips as the base, with eggs as the moistener (much like matzoh brei — like I said, this is a common culinary idea). And north of the border in Tex-Mex cuisine the preparations sometimes become much more elaborate, involving fresh vegetables, cheese, etc.

While I’ve definitely fried up tortilla strips to make migas, at home I usually cut corners and make migas in a terribly-lazy-but-delicious Tex-Mex fashion: I use crushed tortilla chips (i.e. pre-fried tortillas), and I mix salsa into the eggs instead of prepping fresh vegetables. The salty chips and the salsa also incidentally season the whole dish, which is a nice bonus.

While I often put a little sausage or ham in my migas, in this case I decided to make good use of leftover cauliflower and transform it into delicious migas filling. As the cauliflower cooks and softens, the butter browns around it, coating each little nubbin of sweetening cruciferous vegetable in tiny flecks of browned milk solids as a nutty smell rises from the pan. It tastes great, it uses up poor-unloved cauliflower, and if made at scale it can stretch an already economical dish even further. What’s more to love?