Saturday, March 08, 2008

Suburban Harvest

Our crop of winter vegetables is slowly ripening. (It's still winter! For another week or so.)
I don't know why I've been reluctant to eat them. We had an amazing raw broccoli salad a while ago that I promise to blog about. And today the cauliflowers were so damn ready, we just sliced off three small heads and roasted them for lunch.
All vegetables are terrific roasted, with oil and salt. The objective is not to scorch them, the way I imagined you should when I first heard about roasted vegetables. (Hey. Roast beef gets a brown crust. Why not vegetables?) Be gentle.
After cooking in the oven (375ยบ, about half an hour, with a little resting time, oven off), we slathered the cauliflower with chopped kalamata olives, garlic, squooshes of anchovy paste, lemon zest, chile pepper flakes and capers. Make up your own sinful mix.
One entire lunch of solid vegetal matter, fresh off the stem. So filling. So thrilling.
(Biggles, shut up.)

10 comments:

Chilebrown said...

Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like 'swell?"
And 'so's your old man?"
Well, if so my friends,
Ya got trouble,
Right here in River city!
With a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Pool.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City!
I am Harold Hill, and I am going to the Market Tommorrow morning. You got any Citrus. That rymes with C and stand for Foo and

Anita (Married... with dinner) said...

and gorgeous, too

peter said...

I have romanesco envy.

The Italian Dish said...

Cookiecrumb: I just have to ask - how much is a "squoosh"?

Katie Zeller said...

Winter vegetables! Winter gardens! I don't have one - too wet and too far from the house. But our neighbor does...surely she can't keep track of how many cauliflower are left... And it's dark...

Heather said...

That sounds delicious! I do the same thing to summer veg (except grill instead of roast). Romanesco freaks me out, though.

Great photo!

Chilebrown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

And any left-over roasted cauli makes a terrific soup :)

Anonymous said...

Yum! Such a successful experiment!

And to think I felt so sorry for your poor knocked-over broccoli plant just a little bit ago...

cookiecrumb said...

Chilebrown: Don't worry, it's cool to get old. Old is the new young.

Anita: Your photo of the romanesco is even better than mine.

Peter: I'm just gonna have to bleep my response.

TheItalianDish: I'm so glad you're back.
Um. A squoosh is the length of time it takes to squeeze anchovy paste from a tube, while saying "Squoosh." Slowly.

KatieZ: Didn't know you were larcenous!

Heather: Romanesco is very, very freaky. Good for eating, though. A little sweet. I'm gearing up for my summer grilling.

Morgan: "Leftover"? "Leftover"? :D

El: Oh, and I never even bothered to replant the knocked-over broccoli. It just decided it had a will to live, and rerooted itself. I stand in awe.