Sequestration Meal #393

 

This was a pretty simple meal to put together, and it includes a new revelation to me: cauliflower leaves!

There is the familiar here--steamed white rice and teriyaki soy curls topped with some sesame seeds and scallions. (The recipe for the soy curls is found at Courtney's Homestead.) And then there is a new adventure in the form of this recipe from V for Veggy: butter garlic soy sauce cauliflower leaves stir fry. (I used a vegan butter, of course.) 

I only recently learned that cauliflower leaves are edible. Even my extremely frugal mother pulled cauliflower leaves off the head and tossed them. And the store expects you to throw them out--you don't get much leaf attached to most cauliflower heads you buy. So I think we should consider them free food! I saved the leaves from the cauliflower steaks and pakoras I made and they held up really well in a sealed container, like you might expect from cabbage. Thus, on top of everything else, cauliflower leaves would provide you a way to have a fresh veggie in the long seasons of avoiding grocery stores, if avoiding grocery stores is a thing you might do (I'm on week four here). The amount of leaves you find attached to most heads of cauliflower isn't huge--probably enough for two servings, mostly--but we can't complain about free vegetables, can we?

Furthermore, cauliflower is a winter vegetable, so this is a fresh green you can find in winter. Why we haven't all been eating them all along is so odd.

I was expecting them to be bitter or something, but they weren't, and they softened pretty easily. They tasted a bit like cauliflower, and a bit like cabbage, and a bit like nothing I've ever had. They were also a very pretty green before the soy sauce got added to this recipe, but I think they'd be good without soy sauce, too, so I'll be trying them without soy sauce next time around. But there is a such a thing as clear soy sauce now, too, and I want it. But I'm restraining myself from being silly for the time being.

Though this could have been prettier and more colorful, probably, this was a really fun meal.