View full size
Vegetables – Going Vegan
Lemon and curry flavors turn roasted cauliflower into a caramelized candy.People do some pretty awful things to vegetables. They toss beautiful broccoli florets or asparagus spears into steamer baskets, then let them cook away for what seems like the length of the movie “Titanic.” What emerges is bland, soft and so unpalatable that not even generous drizzlings of prized olive oil and sea salt can save them.
Worse, some folks toss perfectly good vegetables such as cauliflower, green beans and potatoes into big pots of boiling water, again leaving them on high heat so long that they’re robbed of their flavor and a lot of their nutritional value, resulting in side dishes of mushy messes.
No wonder so many children say they hate eating vegetables.
Recipes included with this story: Roasted Cauliflower; Ned Ludd’s Charred Bruss; Roasted Broccoli With Toasted Hazelnuts.
Vegetables often don’t fare much better at restaurants, where you’d think capable cooks would show them a measure of mercy. But how many times have you been at a corporate kitchen or hotel restaurant and been served that ubiquitous Mediterranean melange of yellow squash, zucchini and red pepper strips, all cut in such an industrialized way that you know they came frozen out of the back of a food-service truck?
Recently, I was at a beautiful resort in Silverton where this veggie medley was sautéed to the point of being nearly liquefied, then tossed with overcooked fettuccine and a splash of mediocre cooking wine. Besides a side of french fries, it was the menu’s one depressing nod to vegetarians and vegans, and went down with all the joy of a PBS pledge drive.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. At home, cooks should think of steaming mostly in terms of single-digit minutes, not by the quarter hour, while leaving boiling water for making pasta. And restaurants should wise up that as more people focus on vegetables through campaigns such as Meatless Mondays, or turn to a vegetarian or vegan diet, they’ll expect more than a consolation prize such as a grilled vegetable plate. Really, we deserve better, and we ought to demand as much when we go out.
One way to improve the success ratio cooking vegetables is to roast them in the oven. Unlike steaming, which just cooks the vegetables, roasting changes and improves the way they taste, bringing out their sweetness as natural sugar caramelizes under the oven’s dry heat. Roasting also changes their texture and color, making them crisp and brown, and sometimes adding delicious bits of char that give them intensity.
For years, I’ve been serving roasted cauliflower to family and friends. It’s one of the easiest ways to prepare cauliflower, and I’ve experimented with spices, oils and Dijon mustard, plus a bit of citrus at the end from squeezed lemon wedges to bring it all together. People go crazy for it, so recently I decided to tweak it for roasted broccoli that has perfectly cooked stems, but flower heads that aren’t reduced to mush. To keep the lemony flavor, I was inspired to add lemon zest using a new Microplane grater I got for Christmas. When zesting, you want to grate off only the bright yellow lemon skin, rotating the lemon whenever you get to the bitter white pith. For extra richness, I add chopped, roasted hazelnuts from the farmers market.
View full size Jason French of Ned Ludd restaurant prepares charred Brussels sprouts with lemon and chili flakes.We’re at the tail end of Brussels sprouts season, but there’s still time to try out a recipe from chef Jason French that first appeared in MIX magazine last year. At French’s Northeast Portland restaurant Ned Ludd, he turns sprouts into sweet, charred beauties that diners gobble up like candy.
“Growing up in a house where ‘bruss’ were bastardized, any recipe that elevates them to their rightful place is worth making,” French told us.
While the secret to Ned Ludd’s sprouts is the restaurant’s wood-fired oven, French told me the dish could easily be re-created under the broiler using a searingly hot cast-iron skillet. Since then, I’ve made his roasted Brussels sprouts a half-dozen times — always perfect, and always a world away from the mushy sprouts generations of kids would move around on the plate, hoping mom wouldn’t notice that they weren’t being eaten.
Want to show veggies real respect? Give them a roast.
– Grant Butler
Follow @grantbutler
Vegetarian, Raw and Vegan with Bill & Sheila
______________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)
Return from vegetables to Home Page
If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:
Follow spanishchef.net on TWITTER
