The Child Who Ate Cauliflower (And Other Fairytales)

I found some great looking swordfish last week and decided to grill it in a mustard marinade, and I sneakily decided to introduce cauliflower, hidden by the great grilled fish, to my wife. Oh, she makes all the appropriate noises about loving vegetables, and her desire to eat a healthy diet, but her most fervent food desire is a big steak with crispy fried potatoes.

But I like cauliflower; I don’t have any experience with fooling myself into eating it. Many people are put off by the faint sulfur odor of some cauliflower dishes, so I had to minimize the rotten egg stench (as she describes it) while still making it palatable. I also didn’t want to spend hours in the kitchen. After all, grilling a piece of fish takes about 5 minutes, and I wanted the cauliflower to be as easy. I decided to roast it in the oven, with a bit of garlic and wine. Easy, easy, easy! I cut the cauliflower into large florets, put them in a baking dish, sprinkled some minced garlic over them, and added a cup or so of white wine to the bottom of the dish. I then covered it in aluminum foil and roasted it for about 30 minutes at 400°F. Then I removed the foil (hoping that would allow some of the sulfur odor to dissipate), drizzled some olive oil and tossed a tablespoon of grated parmesan cheese over the florets and cooked it for another 15 minutes to brown the cauliflower.

The cauliflower went very nicely with the swordfish, and you can’t beat the meal for simplicity. But the stunning part of this overlong story is that our 13 year old saw me making the cauliflower and asked to help. Then, when we sat down to eat, she decided that cauliflower was the best food in the universe and insisted that she have it for a snack when she came home from school the next day.

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