No, you're not looking at an enchanted forest on a planet made of Play-Doh, you're looking at broccoli. Sort of. It's Romanesco, a fractal vegetable from the broccoli family. It's sometimes called Romanesco broccoli and perhaps better known as the Broccoflower, as it's often mistaken for a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid (which, as we understand, does exist and looks a lot like Romanesco).
We have to admit though, we're not too concerned with its classification -- what we really want to know is how it tastes sautéed with butter and sea salt.
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Whoopie pie -- a regional Maine/Pennsylvania/Midwest cookie with two round cakes and a frosting center -- is having its moment in the sun. With recipe!
With restaurants closing left and right due to the economy, chef jobs are really, really hard to come by. Like, 300 people will apply to a single $25,000-a-year, no-benefits job.
I've often felt that cooking cauliflower is no-win situation. Either you serve it "healthy" - say, steamed with a little salt and lemon juice - and it tastes like packing peanuts (well, packing peanuts with lemon juice), or else you smother it with cheese or butter or creamy curry sauce and completely destroy its virtue. But recently I have seen the error of my ways. The key to cauliflower that's delicious and healthy (and easy): Roast it, with just the tiniest bit of bacon.
I simply toss the cauliflower florets in a mixture of olive oil and mustard, throw them on a baking pan with a handful of whole peeled garlic gloves and some chunks of slab bacon, sprinkle on a little salt and roast at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The cauliflower gets soft on the inside and crisp and caramelized at the edges, the mustard-olive oil mix gets condensed and flavorful and a little sticky, the garlic cloves become pungent and golden. The bacon, barely more than a condiment, adds depth and crunch (though it could easily be omitted). This, with some garlicky lentils, has been my go-to weeknight meal for the past month. Try it - you won't be sorry.
Let me first say that I am not proud. I am not proud of having bought a bag of pre-cut broccoli and cauliflower florets in the first place. Broccoli and cauliflower are ridiculously easy to slice up, so I realize that the slight convenience is hardly worth the markup. Next, I'm not proud of waiting until brown spots had appeared on the veggies to cook them up. But I was hungry, so I pared those brown parts right off and quickly disposed of the evidence.
Then it was time to cook, and things were looking up. I decided to douse them with spices and roast them until they were, well, browned again, but in a good way this time. When I shook them around the pan halfway through, I was sure I'd overdone the spices. But once they were finished cooking, the spices had formed a savory partial crust over the florets, making for a splendid side. Redemption was mine.
Here's the method:
3 cups broccoli and cauliflower florets 3 tablespoons olive oil Salt and pepper 1 teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoon ground coriander
Preheat oven to 425º. In a bowl, toss veggie florets with remaining ingredients. Spread in a single layer on a sheet pan and roast, stirring halfway through the cooking, about 20 minutes or until veggies have begun to brown and spices form a crust.
Growing up, the only form in which I saw cauliflower (or maybe just the only way my mom could get me to eat it!) was steamed and covered in nice thick, white sauce. Now, while I can admit that I still think it's delicious, I'd much rather prefer eating roasted cauliflower.
According to Gourmet Magazine, "Blasting cauliflower florets in a hot over concentrates their natural sweetness, turning them into something akin to vegetable candy."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS) is currently working with a gene that "induce high levels of beta-carotene into food crops." The gene, named Or is responsible for the orange color of some cauliflower and "promotes high beta-carotene accumulation in various plant tissues." Beta-carotene, is processed by the body into Vitamin A, so an increase of its concentration in foods that are naturally low in it could make a significant impact on worldwide Vitamin A deficiencies, which affects approximately 250 million children worldwide. More studies (there have only been eight years' worth) are needed before any action is taken.
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.
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." 
The world of organic meat. 
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. 
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