Cauliflower - for Lovers and Haters Alike

Cauliflower has many fans. Also many enemies.

"This is dinner? Is this some kind of cruel, sick joke?" asked a friend who saw my cookbook opened to a cauliflower curry. I had actually planned to substitute some less objectionable vegetables for the cauliflower in deference to his preferences. Hater!

My friend Thom is in the Cauliflower Lover camp. She writes,

Cauliflower is my favorite vegetable!  I like it steamed, roasted, saluted or mashed (but not so much raw.) It is high in potassium and fiber.  A whole entire head of cauliflower is only 150 calories and it will fill you up! 

When you buy the cauliflower, make sure there are no brown spots or black dots on them.  You want the florets to be tightly closed. It's they are loose, the cauliflower has likely been sitting on the shelves for a long time. 

When you cook cauliflower, break it into florets or cut it into smaller pieces, making  sure they are uniform size so they will cook evenly.  Don't throw the stems away! They add texture to the dish. Cut the stem into even smaller pieces, since the stem pieces take longer to cook.

For a simple and tasty recipe, I recommend roasting cauliflower in a pan on a single layer. Crowding the pan will make it harder for the cauliflower to caramelize.  For every 1 head of cauliflower, I would add 2-3 garlic cloves to it. Just smash it and throw them in with the florets.  Drizzle olive oil, salt and pepper for taste and mix well. Put the pan into a 375-400 degree oven for 30-35 minutes, and you are done! 

If you like to walk on the wild side, here are different variations:

a) Before roasting, sprinkle 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder to the fore and mix well. Very healthful!

b) After the cauliflower has been roasting for 20 - 25 minutes (about 10 minutes before it's done), remove the pan and sprinkle a thin layer of Parmesan cheese on the cauliflower. 

Yum! Look how caramelized and snackable these florets look.

For those whose only association with cauliflower is a boiled-to-the-point-of-waterloggged mess method, this recipe can be a revelation.

As a test, I recommended Thom's method to Lol to see if she would try it. Success! Lol said, "Amazingly tolerable! And I think it would even work with frozen cauliflower, since you're eliminating the whole waterlogged part."

One Hater converted, millions to go. Our work is just beginning.

Velvety Roasted Pears

I could have just as easily called this entry "Ridiculously Simple Roasted Pears" or "When Bad Produce Happens to Good People - Pears." All titles would be fair and accurate. The pears are velvety; the method of preparation is time consuming, but is embarrassingly simple; and roasting is a great answer for the problem of under-ripe, mealy and withered pears - the kind of pears you might already possess.

For eating out of hand, my favorite varieties of pear are  seckel and comice, though I find forellle the most beautiful. Over the years I've tried almost every kind of pear I could find, including yellow and red bartletts (by far the most popular varieties in the US), bosc, and others. For roasting, however, my favorite pear variety is the anjou (or d'Anjou). 

I seldom buy anjou for any purpose other than roasting because typically anjou pears are simply not as juicy and tasty and comices, seckels and (next tier in my personal pear Olympics), boscs. 

Often the anjous - and other pears - are sold rock hard. Unlike other fruit, pears ripen after being picked from the tree. You can hasten ripening by putting them in a bag with a ripe banana or apple, which will give off ethylene gas and promote the pears' own ripening process.

Sometimes, of course, pears pass from rock hard/under-ripe to withered/mealy without passing through the Zone of Lusciousness. Have no fear! Roasting will make pears at either end of the ripeness spectrum as lush and sweet as you might hope. Perfect for the pears that feel like baseballs and for the bag you forgot in the back of the fridge.

Here's what you'll need for the Ridiculously Simple ingredient list: Pears, raisins, cinnamon and water.

Even more Ridiculously Simple is what you won't need: butter, sugar, wine or a peeler.

You will, however, need lots of this: baking time.

Specifics:

1) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees

2) Select a baking dish. I like to use glass baking dishes, but you could also use rimmed metal baking trays. The pears will give off syrup, so think in advance of clean-up and scrubbing. You could line the trays with aluminum foil, but I caution you that things could get a bit sticky. Choose a dish large enough to fit the pears you intend to use, or use the number of pears for which you have a dish. For example, I fit 8 pear halves (4 pears, I hope I don't need to say) on the oblong 4 qt. baking dish in the photo below. Any shape of dish - square, rectangular, oval, etc. - is potentially fine to use. You could also use a combination of dishes as I typically do.

3) Sprinkle your baking dish with ground cinnamon. I loooooove cinnamon (to quote a friend from Yorkshire), so I use a heavy hand - maybe "shovel" would be a better word choice than "sprinkle."

Enough cinnamon?

4) Slice the pears in half. Using a small spoon - a demitasse spoon is good if you hail from a more genteel era and have one - dig out the pear's seed pod.

5) Stuff the cavity with 4-5 raisins, or as many fit comfortably.

What manner of jewel have I in my navel?

6) Place the pears raisin-side down on the cinnamony dish. Pour about a half inch of water on the whole shebang. 

A relaxing cinnamon bath

7) Here's the hard part: believing how long you need to keep the pears in the oven. The baking time is well over an hour, closer to 2 hours. Every 20 minutes or so you'll need to add some water to the roasting pan. Your goal is to keep the pears from scorching. You do, however, want to get them good and roasted! This is the key to the velvety texture mentioned in the title. I've mentioned elsewhere about the unreliability of my oven temperature. Perhaps my 400 is really 375. No matter. Keep an eye on both the clock and the water level.

8) You think they're done now? Go back and give them another 20 minutes.

Here's what you're looking for. Burnt? Overdone? No way. Think deep, caramelized flavors.

What you're looking for - even if you don't know it

.

9) Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool a bit. Carefully remove the pears using a spatula. Add a small amount of water to loosen the pears if necessary. After cooling, pears can be frozen if you're not going to use them right away.

Just chillin'

Wasn’t that Ridiculously Simple? No hassle of peeling the pairs. No need for sugar, wine, butter, etc. to replace the flavor that you never took away. On the contrary, you intensified and enriched the flavor! No worries that your peeled pears look a little lopsided or some of the pears got more of a flavor injection (from the wine-sugar) than did the other side, and now you have to come up with a way to balance the flavors.

Here they are in all their velvety glory. 

I like them just as is, but feel free to add ice cream, crème fraiche or Greek yogurt or use the pears as a topping for pound cake or sliced over pancakes or French toast. As one friend’s child marveled, “This really counts as a fruit, and not as a yummy dessert? Really?”

Really. And only you need to know how Ridiculously Simple these velvety roasted pears were to make.

When Bad Produce Happens to Good People - Grapes

Does this picture make the grapes look juicy and inviting? Trickery! Trust me, some of them are withered. There are a few moldy ones. Their moistness suggests dankness, not juiciness. And when I bravely tasted a couple, I found their flavor most unprepossessing.

What to do with grapes like these?

My recommendation: reach for your roasting pan.

I forget how I began roasting grapes.  I think I found a forgotten bag of grapes in the back of the refrigerator while I was using the oven to roast something else. I opted for the roasting pan instead of the garbage.

The results of this low-stakes experiment were good enough to make me buy grapes expressly to roast them.

Here's what to do: 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Remove the grapes from the stems, carefully inspecting them for mold and rot. Not every grape graduates! Withered grapes are okay, but moldy grapes still get consigned to the compost bin. I have had the best results with seedless red grapes. Black grapes work well too. Green grapes like Thompson taste good roasted but are not quite as comely as the red grapes - roasting turns them brown. I would definitely roast withered green grapes, but I might hesitate to serve them to company. More for me. Heh heh heh!

. 

The bunch after the buzzards came. A few grapes were too yicchy to advance to the next step

Put the grapes on a baking sheet. I like lining the sheet with foil first, but you could use a silicone mat or parchment or (if you don't mind a messier clean-up) skip the liner entirely.

Over the years I've seen seen a bunch of recipes for roasted fruit. Typically the recipes involve lots of grease (oil or butter) and lots of sugar (sprinkle sugar before baking; add honey/agave/etc.) afterwards. I'm a little mystified by this: who wants greasy grapes? Granted, oily grapes will scurry right off the baking sheet, but that's not a great reason to add grease to your food. The grapes give off a marvelously complex version of grape juice when they roast, so you shouldn't need more liquid (let alone a greasy liquid) to cook them.

As for the added sugar, the whole point of roasting fruit is the caramelization of the fruit's own sugar. Do you remember the advertising slogan (that I assume came from a grape trade group;I like the name "The Center for Grape Affairs" but I admit I'm making this up) - "Grapes: Nature's Candy"? Here's a clue! Grapes are sweet. Some fruit may need the boost, but in my experience grapes don't.

I generally roast the grapes for about 20 minutes. If I have other stuff in the oven, especially cooking at a different temperature, I will adjust the time upward or downward. I should probably stop vilifying my oven for its different climatic zones, so I'll just quickly mention that location within the oven matters too. Sometimes a few grapes end up being burnt so that the others end up roasted sufficiently. Their comrades appreciate their sacrifice. I know I do.

Almost there

Note the caramelization

Remove the grapes from the oven. While these guys cool off, I'll follow up on my sister-in-law's suggestion that I include some interesting nutritional information about the produce I write about. Grapes are now understood to have many health benefits - a far cry from what I was told as a kid, namely that grapes were basically sugar and water. Red grapes have resveratrol, a compound that - at least in mouse and rat experiments - fights cancer and inflammation; lowers blood sugar; and offers cardiovascular benefits. A related compound, piceatannol, which is found in red grapes, red wine and peanuts, blocks the growth of fat cells. The deep color of red grapes, as in purple cabbage, comes from anthocyanins, antioxidants that fight also fight inflammation and cancer.  Grapes are a good source of several vitamins (C, A, K, B-complex) and minerals (copper, iron, potassium and manganese). 

Now that your roasted grapes are done, enjoy!

Here are some serving suggestions:

• Mix in with Greek yogurt
• Use as a topping for pancakes or waffles (or pound cake)
• If you include fig jam, membrillo or guava paste when you serve cheeses, put a dish of roasted grapes instead. Roasted grapes are a fine addition to little bruschetta with ricotta or blue cheese
• If you include dried cranberries in salads, consider substituting roasted grapes
• Of course, putting it in a dish and eating it with a spoon is #1 in our house!

You may never look at withered grape the same way again.