Weekend Gourmet: Show some love for cauliflower

All you vegetarians that read the headline and fainted because I’m giving a vegetable recipe, just stay down for a minute. I’m going to channel my inner Dennis Rogers.

Bacon? REALLY? Hot dogs and sausage thrown in for good measure and of course the World Health Organization forgot country ham because they’re not Southern. I realize that one death from nitrate related cancers is too many, but let’s look at this – 34,000 in a world of 8 billion? Lumping these foods with tobacco and asbestos seems a bit much. They could have included driving a car, which is much deadlier that eating bacon. For complete transparency, I just finished a cookbook on bacon. I cooked more than 100 pounds just for the book – along with the thousands of pounds that I cooked in my lifetime. My colonoscopy was clean.

However.

I’m not a trained nutritionist, but believe it or not I do watch what I eat and have studied foods and their effects for the last 30 years. All these foods should be eaten in moderation. Not just for cancer prevention, but cholesterol and diabetes. Same with red meat, which the WHO believes, almost, should be in the same category. But, I’m not going to stop eating bacon, using bacon fat to season some foods or give up hot dogs. I eat them maybe once a week, and I don’t think my obituary is going to read, “He died from bacon”!

However (don’t you love these howevers).

There are foods that possibly help protect you against your misdeeds. They are cruciferous vegetables. They are the vegetables you hated as a child: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, chard, the veggie patch darling that is kale, mustard greens, rutabagas, turnips and cauliflower. All these vegetables are high in fiber, vitamins, minerals, beta-carotene and sulforaphane. We need to add more of them in our diet.

Mark Twain, always a keen observer, claimed, ”Cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.” It certainly is the more highfalutin member of the cabbage family, and probably one, along with Brussels sprouts that gets little respect because they both are usually cooked to a mushy death.

Roasting is the way to go with cauliflower. The method brings out its earthy mysteries as well as its elegance. Combined with the pungent flavor of capers, the vegetable is raised to a level you just can’t get from boiling or steaming.

Brussels sprouts, rutabagas, and turnips can also be cooked in this manner. With the temperature falling and the warmth of an oven a welcome addition to the house, it’s a good time to expand your vegetable cookery. The oven temperature remains the same, and the seasoning is up to you. Carrots, fall and winter squash, along with sweet potatoes are awesome from the roasting pan. Mix in some quartered onions for added flavor as well as thyme, rosemary or sage. Believe it or not, green beans are a beautiful taste configuration when roasted. And parents, the added benefits of this method are most kids love roasted veggies. A meatless meal of roasted vegetables is as good or better than that summer vegetable plate.

I’m sure by now the vegetarians have risen from the floor, but I’m not done with bacon yet. Some diced bacon thrown in when roasting cauliflower or Brussels sprouts is a really good thing. Bacon does make everything better.

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Weekend Gourmet: Show some love for cauliflower."