Bet You Never Heard This As A Kid!

Eat your crosses like a good child!

What you see below are the blooms of my winter collard greens:



Numerous vegetables like collard and mustard greens, kale, cabbages, radishes, arugula, watercress, tatsoi, broccoli and cauliflower belong to the family known as Brassicaceae or Cruciferae or more simply Cruciferous. This, of course, was back when no one spoke American.

Cruciferous vegetables are called so because when blooming, they bear tiny flowers similar to crucifixes. Kinda neat, huh?

Just how neat these vegetables are is further enlightened by recent studies that show Cruciferous vegetables aid the body's immune system by providing an anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-cancer effect.

Now, I understand that a lot of people don't like these veggies because they believe them to taste foul, but I argue that usually the crappy taste is a by-product of poor cooking techniques. Most of these vegetables are loaded with rather disagreeable compounds that are released during the cooking process. Certain smelly chemical compounds. Imagine of a pot of boiling brussel sprouts. I agree, it smells nasty! This is where "blanching" comes in handy.

Blanching a vegetable means simply to cook a vegetable partially in boiling water, then "shocking" it in ice water to stop the cooking. This technique has a multi-fold purpose in a professional kitchen.

First, it releases the aforementioned, undesirable gases. Secondly, it breaks down particular enzymes that can accelerate the natural ripening or eventual breakdown of the vegetable. It is imperitive to stop these enzymes by blanching prior to freezing vegetables. Your veggies will love you for it. Thirdly, it prepares your vegetable for it's eventual marriage with other delightful ingredients, such as sauces or simple garnishes such as herbs or other blanched vegetables.

The process is simple and is desirable for the harder vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. Bitter greens like mustard and turnip greens can be blanched prior to cooking to remove some of the bitter qualities from them before cooking them to death with a piece of fatback as we do here in the South. Obviously, you wouldn't want to blanch something like watercress because it cooks in a flash. And horseradish? Well, don't be an idiot.

So, immerse the veggie in boiling water and when it is still undercooked or cooked to "a point", remove the vegetable and submerge in immediately into an ice-water bath to "set" the color. This undercooking will allow you to reheat the vegetable completely without overcooking it.

Afterwards, you could saute your cauliflower for example, with butter, garlic, a bit of fresh thyme salt and fresh cracked pepper for an easy, fresh and tasty side dish. Add an ounce or two of white wine, reduce, a 1/4 cup a cream, reduce and finish with some grated pecorino cheese and flat leaf parsley. You are moving into flavors unknown to most.

Take your lowly brussel sprout, blanched, of course. Saute those with some fine diced onion, garlic, add some cannelini beans, diced tomato, diced tasso ham, tarragon and a small squirt of lemon juice and a half cup of vegetable stock and reduce for a couple of minutes. Man, somebody will put a jihad on your brussel sprouts!

Enjoy and by all means experiment!! Don't be afraid of broccoli romanesco because it looks like genital warts. It has a flavor so sublime falling somewhere between broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus and artichokes. Outstanding!

And if it still tastes like shit then find a new hobby. I hear stamp collecting is great fun.

This has been a public service announcement from Burning Toast. Now back to the regular programming of cute kitty pictures, vulgar rants and just general being pissed off at the ignorance of the world and other random madness.