Purple Cauliflower

Fruits & Vegetables, Side Dishes2 Comments

Your eyes are not deceiving you. This isn’t some wacky Photoshop hack.

Purple Cauliflower

I was wandering through the last few days of the fall market at the Harrisonburg Farmers Market when I came across a booth with… purple cauliflower? I asked the farmer, “What is this purple cauliflower?” and he replied, “Well, it’s purple cauliflower!” I was expecting some sort of bizarre answer, after my encounters with alien cauliflower, but no. It was just purple cauliflower. According to Wikipedia:

Purple color in cauliflower is caused by the presence of the antioxidant group anthocyanins, which can also be found in red cabbage and red wine.^[9] Varieties include ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Purple Cape’.

Excellent! But what would I do with it?

I decided to follow the same path as I did with the romanesco cauliflower; I boiled it.

Purple Cauliflower, boiling

Holy cow – that was fun!

Then, I mixed it with some Daiya mozzarella and unsweetened soymilk and turned it into cheesy purple cauliflower.

Cheesy Purple Cauliflower

And while this was cheesy right off the spoon, it was even more delicious when I started dunking hunks of crusty bread into it.

I will miss the awesome produce of the farmers market through the winter. The market does continue through the winter here, but finding local, seasonal produce becomes less and less likely. Just one more reason to look forward to spring!