Cauliflower and Other Delightful Fall Veggies

It's recipe day!

Our CSA members are getting a treat today: the first of our cauliflower harvest. I've been looking forward to cauliflower ever since I started watching for these white heads on the plants back in August. They're finally coming into their own! Cauliflower is delicious, surprisingly nutritious for a white vegetable (B6 and C, anyone?), and it's versatile. It can be steamed, roasted, served as raw florets in a salad or on a relish tray.

As it happens, an interesting web site that I visit occasionally has Cauliflower for it's food of the week this week. "World's Healthiest Foods" has a lot of information about hundreds of foods, so it's one of the places I go to get info on the quick. Today, one of the recipes they're featuring is 5-Minute Healthy Sauteed Cauliflower. It looks delicious!

But my favorite is Faux-tay-toes. Some months ago, my favorite food author, Dinner Diva Leanne Ely wrote about making some stand-by side dishes healthier, and giving their flavor a new, tasty twist. Mashed faux-tay-toes are easy to make (plus it's just fun to say faux-tay-toes), and my family's been enjoying them for years. All you need to do is steam  your head of cauliflower, broken into large florets, until it's really tender. Then drain it, and grab your favorite potato mashing device: masher, blender, food processor, or hand mixer. Add a touch of butter, a bit of cream cheese, salt and pepper to taste, and smash away until the texture is right for you. My food experiment for the week: I plan to add a handful of finely diced, colored sweet peppers. I'll let you know how it turns out!

More cauliflower are on their way...as are tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, Brussels sprouts and more! We still have a couple of weeks of harvest here at the farm. And all this diversity of produce makes me want to make a great vegetable soup. My soups are never the same twice. I like to grab a couple of handfuls of whatever vegetables I have on hand, make sure to add a nice big handful of chopped onion and a crushed clove or three of garlic, and then saute it all in the soup pot for a few minutes with a little olive oil. This time of year, I might even add a handful of chopped walnuts or hickory nuts. Follow that up with a nice chicken broth or stock, about a quart of stock per quart of veggies, and I've got a unique, tasty treat every time.