Cauliflower Adventure

Uma aventura em couve flor

Remember the people a few years ago claiming you could make pizza bases with just cauliflower? Evil. Then there was that woman this year claiming that you could make cauliflower fudge. Doubly evil. Leave the cauliflower alone, weird influencers!

I love cauliflower, but I use it in limited ways. I love those ways so much, why would I invent? There’s only so many days in a year to fit cauliflower into.

• Cauliflower cheese, OBVIOUSLY, or mac and cauliflower cheese

• Piccallli

• Pickled cauliflower chopped in tiny pieces to chuck on top of dishes such as carne de porco à alentejana

• Spiced sautéed cauliflower.

HOWEVER, a new cauliflower dish has entered my life.

Yesterday a friend came for lunch. Also, he came to make that lunch, because he makes a fabulous rabbit stew, slow cooked in white wine with thyme and rosemary and Luís had expressed a desire to eat it.

I was working all morning, so I left the boys in the kitchen, shutting the door to my office so I could concentrate away from all their nattering and clattering.

“à mesa!” shouted Luís, and I put down my pencil and went to the mesa.

There was a big casserole filled with the lovely fragrant, herby, gently fruity rabbit stew, a bowl of bread, some queijo da serra curado and a dish with a pile of mush plopped onto it.

“Oooh, you made migas! Yum!” I said.

Migas, the alentejana kind, not the northern kind (also extremely delicious), is a pile of mush. I’m not one for most mushes. Açorda is anathema to me, and you couldn’t pay me to eat oat porridge, but migas alentejanas are special mush.

Migas alentejanas are made of stale bread, grease rendered from pork meat and sausages, garlic and water, all mashed up, cooked, and reformed into a pile of stiff mush, a divine pile of stiff mush. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?

“Nope, not migas”, said Rui. “this is esparregado. Cauliflower esparregado. Alentejo thing.” He is from the Alentejo and is the greatest advocate for everything Alentejano I have ever met, and he knows a whole bunch of recipes that nobody has ever heard of except for genuine Alentejanos.

“Whoa!” I said, “What do you mean?”

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Read here about usual esparregados:

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This esparregado that looked like migas was made of cooked cauliflower and stale bread crumbs (about half and half), a vast amount of garlic, a dash of vinegar, olive oil and the cauliflower cooking water.

Cauliflower Esparregado. Looks awful, is wonderful.

It was incredible. I ate more of it than I did the rabbit, much more.

Pasty, savoury, garlicky and still cauliflowery and with discernible bits of succulent cauliflower, I guzzled it, stopping after every mouthful to compliment it, to ask for the recipe, to say “wowser” or “mmmmmmmm”, and to state that we are going to eat this at least once a week from now on.

Rui had to go and refresh his car park ticket. When he came back, he had brought a weed with him from the car park.

“I used to eat this all the time. It’s delicious. Here, try some.”

I’ll try anything, but I’m not eating something picked from a car park. I did an image search on it, while he and Luís nibbled on the tiny green fruits. It came back with two possibilities, one of which was noxious for cattle and horses. I declined.

“I’m not a wimp,” I said, “but I can’t risk getting sick from eating a weed found in a car park, I have loads of work on.”

“So you are a wimp, then!” he said.

Haven’t heard back from him since he left, but Luís is still alive, so I guess it was the non-toxic kind, at least in Portuguese males.

the green thing from the car park. so pretty. still not going to eat it.