How to cook cauliflower

How to cook cauliflower for one of my favourite recipes that can be prepared in under fifteen-minutes.

I was never crazy about cauliflower because I used to think if food does not taste good then mostly, it is a waste of time. How wrong we can be.

Now this has become a very simple, quick and delicious meal; and nutritious too. I was taught it by my Lebanese nanny but she used it for cooking green-beans. In fact it's for virtually any vegetable.

Disclaimer

Last week when the garden started to turn out a dozen fresh cauliflowers (she who must be obeyed is crazy about growing them) and I began to tire of her soup, I thought of Granny-Jo.

She died at 93 with all her marbles intact, by the way which says mountains for the Mediterranean diet she dished up.

So I adapted her exquisite cooking green beans recipe and now we know how to prepare cauliflower too.

If you have the vegetables in the garden, then wait. Go and prepare the sauce and fifteen-minutes before lunch, with everything else ready, nip down to the cauliflower patch.

First chase Peter Rabbit away, covering him with a basket if possible and with a sharp knife, slice through the stalk. I am being silly, of course but last week, the boss picked two cauliflowers and they are still sitting in the fridge.

That day I tested out this salad to make sure I had not omitted anything; even my granddaughters, aged four and six, asked for more. We finished the lot.

So the next day, I cooked the old cauliflower; it was like chalk and cheese. Freshness is everything with vegetables; after picking the sugars slowly turn to starch. Peel off the older, mature and tatty leaves, but not the stalk and drop them straight on the compost-bin.

Pour about a cup of hot water into a pot, add a teaspoon of salt and bring it to a hard-boil with the lid on. Using a sharp knife, thinly slice the stalk. Do not dump it. It is a perfectly good part of a cauliflower but it takes a bit longer to cook.

Once the salted-water is boiling hard, throw in the young leaves, thinly sliced too and when boiling again, toss in the stalks.

Once again bring the pot back to the boil.

How to cook cauliflower

How to cook cauliflower is so easy.

 Once the thinly-sliced stalks are boiling, toss in the florets. How to cook cauliflower is not the slightest bit difficult.

Once it is boiling hard it takes only about five more minutes before cooking your cauliflower is complete.

What are phytosterols

The young cauliflower leaves too are full of nutrients, especially phytosterols but they take a little longer to cook.

What are phytosterols? It is the stuff that means you can eat butter instead of margarine and feel no guilt.

In any case, butter is back.

Easy soup recipe

Easy soup recipes are high on my agenda; how to cook cauliflower is but the first step.

At this stage you still have time to change to a soup recipe, if you decide you want a hot dish instead, or even a roasted chicken on cauliflower; it definitely needs a bit of buttering up, so I am using two or three cloves of garlic, a slither of hot red chili and the juice of a whole lemon.

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Aside: You would be astonished at the difference between OJ and real freshly-squeezed orange juice. That from a carton is little better than a junk food, with a very high glycemic index.

Orange juice facts will astonished you. I am certain it is the same for lemon juice; the concentrate from a bottle is awful.

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How to cook cauliflower leads you down so many alleys; interesting ways to use these nutrient-dense vegetables.

Normally I recommend using the pulp of the lemon too, as it contains so many of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals but today just the juice.

Have you got a lemon tree in the garden? An old saying is that the first thing you do when moving into a new home is to plant a favourite from your citrus fruit list. They are so decorative, vital if you want delicious food; or a lime.

As I said above, it is rare that the strainer is used when squeezing the juice; pulp and all is the general rule for literally double the nutrients.

Never buy the processed juice; it's loaded with chemicals and tastes awful. Purchasing a couple lemons every week is the alternative to growing your own.

The fresh vitamin C alone makes them worth the cost; one of the four vitals identified in the prevention of frailty syndrome. A determination to enjoy healthy choice foods like this is the secret to preventing the early loss of vitality and strength.

You can either do it in a bowl and whisk with a fork or to get the bits of chili finely-chopped, use a stick blender.

• What is left of the cooking water.
• A couple tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
• 2 to 3 cloves of garlic; more if you like.
• A good slither of chili, seeds and all.
• The juice of one lemon.

Whizz it up.

The capsaicin, the anti-inflammatory substance in chilies incidentally is most richly found in the placenta and seeds; do not dump them but it will be fiery if you add too much.

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If raw garlic repeats on you, gives you heartburn or the family complains then very briefly drop the cloves on top of your cauliflower florets for the last minute of cooking.

Do you see them balancing on top?

Perhaps one raw and another cooked might be a good compromise.

Of course you could now just drop it in an oven dish and pour a delicious cheese sauce over your cauliflower; and bake it for half an hour.

Pour your blended olive-oil juice over the florets, spooning it a few extra times over the cauliflower.

Note the sliced stalk. It's also perfect at this stage for your easy soup recipe. Try a bit of curry to butter it up; definitely do not margarine. Hydrogenated foods^[2] are to be avoided at all costs if you want a healthy nervous system, important not just for the DC; you too.

So there is nothing fancy to our how to cook cauliflower page.

My cauliflower salad recipes lunch today:

• cauliflower florets in garlic, chili and lemon juice sauce
  
• half avocado
• sugar snap peas
• hummus
• cheese
• homemade bread, butter and plum jam
  

I promise you can eat a lunch like this and you need not worry the slightest about the calories in cauliflower, the cholesterol in the butter and the overall carbs on your plate. You will lose weight on a meal like this. Food like this has a seriously low glycemic index.

What is glycemic Index and why is it so important? Understanding a Carbohydrate Count Chart and GI are fundamental to coping with obesity.

Incidentally cooling your veggies as we have just done with our cauliflower, even eating it the next day, allows any starch to undergo retrogradation. It becomes resistant to digestion in the small intestine and reaches the colon where it feeds the very important microbiota producing short chain fatty acids instead of glucose; no blood sugar surge.

If this interests you, read more about resistant starch. This is particularly important for anyone trying to lose weight or is insulin resistant.

Growing lemon trees

The lemon tree is such a beautiful, decorative tree, gracing any garden and so full of nutrients; it rivals the avocado in my mind, though I love and respect them both.

• Growing lemon trees is so easy.

When making any salad, lemon juice and olive oil enhance both the flavour and absorption of vital nutrients. How to cook cauliflower and growing citrus trees go hand in glove.

Another good reason for women of childbearing age is that all citrus contain large amounts of folate, the vitamin that prevents spina bifida.

Spina bifida and orange juice, and lemons too, is a vitally important subject; this is a very serious, wholly preventable disease.

By the time you realise you are pregnant it's already too late if do not have sufficient folate in your diet; the neural tube in the growing foetus is formed in the first weeks. Both you and your child are condemned to a life of misery.

When did you last have a lemon or orange?

Hummus

Hummus is a vital food if you have raised cholesterol. Do you want to get off those nasty statins with side effects like aching legs, impotence and the increased risk of diabetes?

Then this authentic hummus recipe is for you. I can make it in four minutes; dinkum. If you find how to cook cauliflower tedious, this condiment will dicky it up.

Whilst traditionally it is made with parsley (that stuff you must keep away from your randy teenager), I often make it in the winter with those sugarsnap peas you see on my plate. You can eat them pod and all; that makes them perfect for my winter hummus but they must be fresh and sweet.

• How to grow peas.

Now, if you managed to cover Peter Rabbit with a bushel, harden your heart. Actually it is the destructive vervet monkeys that get the paintball gun treatment in our garden. See how they run.

Mixing different foods, like adding a dollop of hummus on the side after how to cook cauliflower is what makes the kitchen such an interesting room.

Let us face it, without enhancement, the cauliflower can be rather dull.

Growing these healthy, scrumptious vegetables like cauliflower is dependent on making a compost pile; it's the place where all your kitchen waste goes to unless you have a worm farm.

The definition of cutworm is something you need to be up on too.

The wonder of worm farms is not something that will capture your imagination until you become a greenie; then subjects like the race to end waste and wean off plastic start to become more central than spending hours watching telly.

Useful links

• Meet Bernard Preston
  
• Easy Lunch Recipes
• Frailty syndrome
  

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