The Cinderella Vegetable

Cauliflower is this year’s kale. It’s undergone a Cinderella-like transformation from the stinky vegetable your mother forced on you to the one everyone’s eating. It’s low carb! You can buy it chopped up so you can pretend it’s rice! (Save your money, use your food processor to chop the flowerets.) It’s even incorporated into frozen pizza crusts! You can even buy cauliflower cookbooks! I found a plethora of cauliflower cookbooks on Amazon.com.

Cauliflower and I have a checkered history. My doctoral project was on beta-carotene supplementation. My research subjects had to eat a fixed, low-carotenoid diet for ten weeks. No tomatoes, no broccoli, no greens. The only vegetable sufficiently low in carotenoids was cauliflower, so these poor guys were subjected to cauliflower every day for the duration of the study. Needless to say, the end of study party had every vegetable  but cauliflower on the table.

As with many other vegetables, our preferred way to cook cauliflower is roasting. This post gives you basic instructions. You can either serve the cauliflower right out of the oven or in a salad the next day. This week I hit the leftovers with extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and seasoning for a lunch salad.

It probably won’t be long before midnight strikes and this Cinderella vegetable is replaced by some other Superfood. Maybe it’ll be okra’s turn to be the belle of the ball.

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