La Fleur de Bretagne

Did you know: Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, kale, collard greens, and kohlrabi are different cultivar groups of a single species, Brassica oleracea or Wild Cabbage?

While it would be a stretch to call either Karen or me a huge fanatic of cauliflower, this so-called flower of Brittany, has been making it on to our dinner plates with increasing frequency. Though cauliflower is typically steamed or boiled, we've recently prepared it in a couple of different ways that we've both enjoyed.

After returning from our trip to Mexico, Karen made a cauliflower and bacon soup using a recipe from one of our favorite San Francisco restaurants, Range. The soup was really easy to make and very delicious - the smokiness of the bacon paired very well with the cauliflower. It was a perfect way to enjoy this vegetable which is at its peak of sweetness during the winter.

A couple of weeks back, I headed out in the rain to the Sunnyvale Farmers' Market, where I picked up three heads of cauliflower for dinner: a purple head, an orange one, and a head of Romanesco. Each of these varietals has an interesting characteristic. The color of the purple version, the type that we previously had with ratatouille, comes from the presence of anthocynanin, an antioxidant that is also found in many different types of berries and red wine. The orange varietal has 25 times more vitamin A than the common white version. And the romanesco is, well, just cool - the fractal pattern is quite fascinating, especially to a math guy like me. We cut up the florets from each of the three heads into bite-sized pieces, tossed them with olive oil and sea salt, and roasted the vegetables in a 400° F oven for 20 minutes. This was also delicious - the two of us polished off more than half of the cauliflower.

The other day, I was shopping at Safeway and noticed some items that I had never previously seen in their produce department: baby cauliflower.


They came in several different varietals, including white, purple, orange, and green.




Somewhere between the size of a ping-ping ball and a tennis ball, these little veggies looked like they came in individual serving sizes.


So, you might ask how many of these miniature flowering heads I picked up. Answer: Zero.

Why?


Yep, you read that right... $3 each... I think that works out to about a dollar a mouthful. At that price, I think that I'll just stick to the normal sized versions.

Guest Blogging: Karen's Analysis of the FFT Readers

Tonight, I'm going to put aside the keyboard to allow Karen to share some of her thoughts. Take it away, sweetie!

How'd You Get Here?

Did You Know: Food for Thought gets more hits from Google searches related to Fred Steak, Real Men of Genius, the Testicle Festival, and the nutritional value of food (generally sushi and Johnsonville Brats) than anything else?

For almost a year now, Food for Thought has been a personal labor of love consistently read by a relatively small group of friends and family. But in recent weeks, traffic to the site has been inching its way upward and Loren has been getting pretty excited. Being a Web 2.0 guy, he’s happy to see his work shared with a broader community. People have been coming from all over the world and getting here in the most interesting ways. I know because Loren (on more than one occasion) has shared his sitemeter statistics with me. While the numbers are nothing compared to the big blogs out there, I think the findings are worthy of note and would like to share some of my favorites.

Before we get started, let me stress again that Loren is thrilled by everyone who comes to visit his blog. The views presented here are mine only. Please don’t take any offense if you happen to see one of your own search terms listed; I am noting it because it was either entertaining or thought-provoking in some way. Come back often!

First, a look at the demographics of Food for Thought readers (from recent statistics):
The majority of readers (82%) come from the US. No big surprise there. But also represented are Australia, the Philippines, Austria, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom, Singapore, Indonesia, China, and the infamous Unknown Country. I know there are German readers out there too - not sure why you guys are getting slighted.

Lots of folks come into the site either through referring URLs (Food Wishes, Carleton, etc.) or personal bookmarks. But as mentioned above, many also come in as the result of various searches. Examples include:

• Testicle Festival
  
  Search terms have included: testicle festival utah, testicle festival woodruff, black gold festival 2007 woodruff. Similar searches result in links to the post about the festival at Mama's Place.
  


• Real Men of Genius
  
  Search terms include: bud light real men of genius, bud light present real men of genius, real men of genius boneless buffalo wings inventor.
  


• Food Nutritional Value
  
  Search terms have included: unfiltered sake calories, calories in unagi don, compare calories in baby back ribs and fish, calories in johnsonville brats. Links are taken to the July 2006 and August 2006 archives (among other places).
  


• Fred Steak
  
  Search terms have included: freds marinade, freds steak marinade, fred’s steak recipe, fred steak.
  

Beer can chicken and cherry picking are also starting to pick up popularity due to recent posts. And math pie/cosahedron/mathematical baking has also popped up more than you might think. Other intriguing searches include: quadruple BK stacker, taco in a bag, wild hotdish, loren cook "grill" (from China no less), and mmmm.

There are too many searches to even begin to mention (and the history only goes back so far). My, until very recently, all time personal favorite (and perhaps the most humorous search getting to Food for Thought) is: massage happy ending boulder co

But a new front runner has taken its place. Thanks to a searcher in New Jersey with ideals similar to mine, "beets nausea" can take its rightful place in the pantheon of Food for Thought Searches. And that lucky reader ended up reading a lovely story.

Let’s see what you come up with next!

Posted by Karen

Offal Is Good!

Did you know: Duck fries are to mallards as Rocky Mountain Oysters are to bulls?

I found out this fascinating fact tonight during my dinner at Incanto (1550 Church Street; 415-641-4500), the Italian restaurant in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco known throughout the Bay Area for their house-cured meats. Food Network fans may recognize Incanto executive chef Chris Cosentino from his recent challenge against Mario Batali on Iron Chef America in "Battle Garlic". (During the next couple of months, Incanto will be featuring a special garlic dinner menu on Friday and Saturday evenings that serve up the same dishes as the ones created during that ICA battle.)

Karen and I had talked about paying a visit to Incanto well before Cosentino's television appearance brought the restaurant into the spotlight, so we took advantage of the opportunity to check it out tonight. In addition to their cured meats, Incanto is well-regarded for their emphasis on using fresh, local ingredients and their award-winning collection of Italian wines. Cosentino is also well-known for his creative use of offal in his menu. In fact, Cosentino writes about variety meats and their preparation in his blog, cleverly titled Offal Good.

Since this was our first visit to Incanto, we decided to stick with the house specialties. We started with the antipasto plate for two, which consisted of house-cured meats, roasted garlic and green onions, and marinated carrots. (We did consider the duck fries though.) The plate had several kinds of cured meats, including a homestyle head cheese, a lamb pâté, some mortadella made with pistachios, and some goose proscuitto. Karen really liked the head cheese, and I was quite pleased with the mortadella. For our main courses, we decided to split a pasta dish and an entree. For the pasta course, we chose the chicken liver agnolotti with fava beans and chianti. I had been looking forward to trying an agnolotti dish after reading Alan Richman's article touting his favorite variety of pasta in the January 2007 issue of Bon Appétit. The pasta was good; the savory filling was silky smooth and bursting with flavor inside al dente wrapping. For the entree, we picked the roasted lamb neck with cardoon, mint, and polenta. The lamb was perfectly cooked, its exterior roasted into a beautiful and tasty crust encasing a generous portion of juicy, fall-apart tender meat. It was great, definitely a dish that I would order again and again. The polenta was quite good as well - we were wondering how much cream and butter went into its making.

We both really enjoyed dinner tonight at Incanto and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in trying something different. Unless, of course, you are a vegetarian, in which case you should look elsewhere for dinner. There aren't a lot of options for non-carnivores there. There are a couple of interesting things to note about Incanto. In response to the San Francisco ordinance requiring restaurants to boost their minimum wage and provide health care benefits for all employees, Incanto instituted a 5% service surcharge to pay for the additional costs. The second note of interest is that Incanto offers filtered still and sparkling Hetch Hetchy water, free of charge, to address concerns about the environmental impact and costs of bottled water. The additional cost of the service charge ended up being balanced out by the free sparkling water - it was a wash for us.