Pan-fried cauliflower January 7, 2010

So we got some cauliflower from the farmshare and I almost never eat the stuff.  I had an amaaaazing cauliflower soup at my friend’s parent’s restaurant on Anna Maria Island one time, and that’s the only memory I have of ever eating cauliflower.  I don’t know how to recreate the soup, nor do I feel like working that hard, so I googled cauliflower recipes and I found that, to my surprise, people seem to prefer dry heat to wet heat.  (I was just working on analogy to broccoli, which probably isn’t the best idea).  Since I like pan-frying, I decided to try that, following 101 Cookbooks.  Well, sort of following it.  I’m using whatever I have on hand rather than what she calls for.  What I have on hand happens to be garlic and leeks from, you guessed it, the farm.  We’ll call it a white dish.  I keep some lemon juice ice cubes around and everyone seems to like lemon with their cauliflower, so I threw in some lemon juice, too.

It turned out pretty good, but I give most of the credit to the lemon juice.  Somehow nothing else seemed that flavorful. But sure, I’ll add cauliflower to the list of vegetables I eat.

Farmshare soup January 4, 2010

I put some sourdough bread in it that I needed to finish before it went stale.

I rarely make soup, but now that I have a sore throat it seemed like a good idea, and when I remembered that I had bouillon cubes, well, that was that.  I threw in a bunch of the vegetables we have lying around: tatsoi (a green leafy thing), carrots, celeriac, kohlrabi, and leeks.  The bouillon cubes were meat consomme stock.  They didn’t have instructions about how much water they go with, but I vaguely remembered 3 cups from my risotto making, so I went with that.  I ended up adding water a few times as the soup boiled.  And yes, it boiled, even though it probably should have simmered.  Whatever, there’s no meat in it for me to make rubbery.  I put the celeriac, kohlrabi, and carrots in first for, I don’t know, 20 minutes? and then the leeks and tatsoi in for another maybe 5 or a little more.  The carrots, leeks, and tatsoi came out great.  The celeriac and kohlrabi were a little too soft, and the kohlrabi just doesn’t taste like anything anymore, so I don’t think I’ll use it in soup from now on.  And the liquid has a weird sweetness to it, that I’m thinking may be the missing flavor of the kohlrabi (I know carrots are the obvious culprit for sweetness, but it doesn’t taste like carrot).  I don’t think it’s a good thing.  I like using the tatsoi this way, though.

So I have now used random assortments of farmshare vegetables in salads, soup, pasta sauce, and sautes.  Although my rutabaga is shriveling up and we have thrown away more old greens than I like to think about, I haven’t done too badly.