Did you know that vinegar can keep cauliflower snow white and broccoli as green as grass?
Posts with tag Cauliflower
Tip of the Day: make your whites whiter, keep your colors vibrant with vinegar
Continue reading Tip of the Day: make your whites whiter, keep your colors vibrant with vinegar
FAIL food
My friends make fun of me because I find the internet hilarious. I can't help it. I love LOLcats, Rickrolling, and, of course, The FAIL Blog (and FAIL Dogs). For those unfamiliar with the FAIL trend, it's basically when people find funny pictures of things not working as planned, and then label them "FAIL." Reading The FAIL Blog has me thinking about all of my personal food FAILS, and how funny FAILS can be when they happen to you. The blog has some pretty awesome food pictures, such as this Salad FAIL, this Vending FAIL and this Dogfood FAIL. One of my favorite cooking blogs, Jumbo Empanadas, also wrote a FAIL post about a strawberry cheesecake -- though it certainly didn't look like a FAIL to me.
I think my biggest cooking FAIL was an attempt to make a cauliflower mash with beautiful purple and yellow cauliflower. Somehow, I thought that I could make it wasabi flavored because you can do that with normal mashed potatoes. I was very wrong, and they turned out disgusting. Please, make me feel less badly: share your FAIL food experiences with us.
Pasta with cauliflower and toasted breadcrumbs
You probably won't win any nutrition awards for this meal (its painfully whitish-tan color reminds us that there aren't many rich nutrients hidden in the dish), but no matter - it's still a delicious dinner choice for meat eaters and veggies alike.
The recipe does call for anchovy filets, so simply omit those if you're a vegetarian (unfortunately, though, anchovies are known to produce a certain je ne se quoi in foods that is hard to reproduce). But there's nothing wrong with a simple pasta and cauliflower dish, too.
One of the keys to this recipe is the roasted cauliflower - you cook them until they're just browned, which is sure to bring out their best flavor. And don't forget the parmesan cheese at the end for an added salty kick.
Food Porn Daily: Cardamom Roasted Cauliflower with Carmelized Onions
There are few things I like in life better than a plate of expertly roasted vegetables. While the act of roasting veggies is fairly easy - toss bite-sized pieces of vegetal matter in a baking pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper and blast under some high heat - I have found that some people seem to have a magic touch when it comes to the old veggie roasting. When making a roasted veggie medley, my friend Cindy takes the time to roast each family of veggies separately so that they are all perfectly cooked. My sister does amazing things with a sheet pan of root vegetables, olive oil, garlic and Bragg's Liquid Aminos. I discovered just last weekend that my friend Fran is also gifted in the roasted vegetable department.
Judging from this plate of Roasted Cauliflower and Caramelized Onions, I do believe that the folks over at Sunday Nite Dinner also have the roasted veggie touch. I would very much like a plate of those multi-colored cauliflower florets right now. Lucky for me, they've posted a link to their blog with the recipe.
If you want to see more gorgeous food pics, head over to the Slashfood Flickr group, where there are 7,818 photos (and counting) for your viewing pleasure.
Colorful cauliflower might be healthier
We're taught that in general, color is more desirable than white in food. This hasn't necessarily been the case for cauliflower, which belies its white color with a nutrition profile similar to its cruciferous siblings, broccoli and cabbage. Cauliflower is high in vitamin C and cancer-fighting antioxidants.
However, thanks to selective breeding (not genetic engineering), cauliflower in different colors are available. They taste the same as white cauliflower, but are just, well, more fun on the plate. Scientists are also claiming that they might be healthier for you than white cauliflower because of the benefits from the compounds that give the vegetables the color.
Healthier than white or not, if its being colorful makes you and your family eat it, that's all the better!
Food Porn Daily: Buttermilk Bleu Cheese and Cauliflower Soup
This last weekend, we had a party for my boyfriend's birthday. We bought lots of food for the festivities, and while the guests ate a good deal of it, there's more than three pounds of cheese in the fridge leftover from the assortment we put out on Saturday night. So I've got cheese on the brain, imagining all the delicious ways to use up this surfeit. So it makes perfect sense that this picture of a bowl of Buttermilk Bleu Cheese and Cauliflower Soup leaped out at me and asked to be featured (have I mentioned my deep and abiding love for cauliflower? Oh, and I have 1/2 a quart of buttermilk languishing in my fridge from a very tasty biscuit experiment).
The picture is actually a couple of years old (although that doesn't make it any less delicious-looking) and comes to us from the cheezemaster. You can find the recipe for the soup in the archives over at What We're Eating.
And as always, don't forget to come and join us over at the Slashfood Flickr Pool. All people and food pictures are welcome.
Chili and Chocolate: The Boston Globe in 60 seconds
- We had a Boston/NY food showdown, and so does The Boston Globe.
- Make some chocolate goodies for your Valentine's Day honey.
- The Sneaky Chef vs. Deceptively Delicious.
- This chili is made with brisket and has no beans.
- Whoopie pies!
- Restaurant reviews: Kingston Station and Jack-Tar.
- This week's recipes: Lemon-Sugar Crepes, Magic Meatballs, Shrimp Remoulade, Turkey Chili, and Macaroni and Cheese.
Brosnan and Broccolini: Bon Appetit in 60 seconds
The world of organic meat. - Have an Earth-friendly dinner party.
- Shopping the seasons.
- This month's recipes include: Cauliflower Steaks with Cauliflower Puree, Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Pistachios, Whole Grain Pancakes with Wild Blueberry-Maple Syrup, Seared Arctic Char with Broccolini, Olives, and Garlic, and Coconut-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes.
- Also in this issue: Organic dark chocolate, the 10 best eco-friendly restaurants, shopping tips, an interview with Pierce Brosnan, and new columns.
Boiled Dinner and Breakfast Bars: The Boston Globe in 60 seconds
- There's no boredom with mushroom ragout.
- What it means to be a young farmer in the 21st century.
- My mom used to make boiled dinner for herself all the time, but not with corned beef (ugh).
- There are currently over 300 restaurants in the U.S. certified as green.
- The Globe taste tests breakfast bars.
- Cauliflower is usually called broccoli in Rome?!
- What are your favorite budget wines?
- This week's recipes: Easy Alphabet Soup, Pasta with Cauliflower, and Raisin Soda Bread,
Cauliflower gene offers health benefits
Genetically modified foodstuffs do not have a very good public relations team working for them. Hearing that food has been genetically modified in some way will turn off most consumers because the assumption associated with it is that the food has been made more pest/disease resistant and less flavorful through unnatural means. Unnatural, in this instance, refers to a quickly forced change in a particular plant and not to a gradual evolution through selective breeding. The word does not have a positive connotation, yet in spite of that, not everything done with GM foods is a bad idea.
This isn't to say that GM foods are necessarily a good idea, but it does show that there are applications beyond inserting jellyfish genes to make food glow.
A beautiful bouquet of cauliflowers
Even if I weren't already absolutely enamored of cauliflower soups, I would be fawning and sighing all over this photograph of Cauliflower and Gorgonzola Soup that Heidi Swanson has posted on her food blog, 101 Cookbooks. I think it might actually be the petal-shaped bowls, but I can't be sure, since if it were foie gras in there, I doubt I'd feel the same way.
The soup is fairly simple to make, as Heidi has written in her adaptation of the original from a cookbook called A Year in My Kitchen by Skye Gyngell. I am intrigued by the idea of adding some flavor punch with blue cheese, as I have made a cauliflower soup before, but relied fairly heavily on roasted garlic for flavor.
Garden Party: Cauliflower soup with toasted garlic and scallions
I had a very long relationship with cauliflower. A whole head lasts one person (sometimes two) a long time, so I had to get creative. I didn't want to eat roasted curried cauliflower every night, no matter how good it was.
Cauliflower soup was an easy bet. Simply steam the florets along with whole cloves of garlic (I used four cloves and a half head of cauliflower) until the florets are impossibly soft. Puree in a food processor with the garlic, adding the steaming liquid to thin it out. You can also use about a ½ c. chicken stock or heavy cream, but I was trying to keep it as vegetarian as possible. The cauliflower on its own was flavorful enough for me. I thought about using a little bit of soy milk or silken tofu to the puree, but didn't want to interrupt the flavor of the cauliflower (though the garlic did that all by itself).
The garlic garnish are simply thin slices that fried about 45 seconds on each side in a little bit of olive oil. The soup tasted hot and cold.
Roasted curried cauliflower
When you don't have a big family living with you, it's a tough thing to buy something like...cauliflower. The heads are enormous, so one or two people will end up eating it for at least three meals. But the thing with cauliflower is that there didn't seem to be much to do with it, so you'd be eating cauliflower the same way every time. I love cauliflower, but at home, the only way I have ever prepared it before was steamed, drizzled with some kind of highly-flavored sauce. Cauliflower, you know, isn't all that flavorful on its own.
Behold: my first ever attempt at a roasted, curried cauliflower. I simply cut the cauliflower into small to medium florets, then tossed the florets, along with whole cloves of garlic, with a little "dressing" made with 3 Tbsp. olive oil, 1 Tbsp. lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste, and about 1/4 tsp. each of cumin, turmeric, and curry powder. I roasted them in a 425 oven for about 25 minutes.
They were delicious, caramelized where the florets had met the baking sheet. I ate them plain, but next time, I might try them with a little homemade raita.
I still have half a head left, though...
Curry may fight cancer
Junk food for productivity, soda for memory, sake for your skin, and now, curry and cauliflower
for cancer? New research from Rutgers
suggests that turmeric and phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC), a chemical that occurs in cruciferous vegetables like
broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and turnips, may help treat and prevent prostate cancer. Researchers
examined mice injected with human prostate cancer cells and found that injections of turmeric and PEITC each slowed the
growth of cancer cells and that when the two were used together, the anti-cancer effects were even stronger. When
turmeric and PEITC were used separately on mice with existing tumors, there was little effect, but once again, when
they were used together, tumor growth slowed. Turmeric, which gives many curries their bright yellow color, has also shown promise in protecting the skin during radiation therapy.
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
Morbid thoughts? Have a cookie
