I almost never go to a vegetable place – whether it’s the supermarket or the shabby vegetable store in midtown or the farmer’s market – without buying a cauliflower. It’s incredible what you can find to do with them.
On Saturday, friends came for lunch. I par-cooked this huge, blindingly white specimen and shocked it in half a freezer’s worth of ice cubes. It was way too big to cook at once, so I cut about two-thirds of it into chunks and cooked it Roman- style: oil, anchovies, loads of garlic, a few dried chiles. I love it, but it evidently alienated some anchovy haters. I have no patience for that, but I kept my mouth shut.
So there was some left over. Yesterday morning, I chopped it up and cooked it, hard, in more oil in a small saucepan, until it was browned on the bottom. Then I cracked two eggs over the top and popped it in the oven until they were set. That was incredible, perhaps as good as the thing that inspired it, some roast cauliflower deal with eggs on top that I had at ABC Kitchen the other night.
Last night I took what was left and roasted it in butter; didn’t take long, since the cauliflower was already cooked. Browned nicely, super-tender, held together. A nice side dish.
There were leftovers from that, too. I chopped them up, combined them with leftover bread-torn-into-crumbs from Danish rye (my new passion; you’ll be reading about it before too long) and cooked them both, hard just as yesterday, until the bread crumbs were crisp and the cauli browned. Then I dumped over that the leftover arrabbiata (tomato-chile-garlic) sauce I’d made for eggplant last night and cooked it for a couple of more minutes. It was sort of ugly (as you can see, in the stage before the tomatoes were added), but a super breakfast.
Now on to the broccoli rabe…