carve your cauliflower

Cauliflower has a complex, beautiful architecture.

Carve a cauliflower with the same love & respect for structure as you would a game bird. It makes me sad that cauliflower gets a bad rap. So what, it's the only white vegetable, it still has personality. (Okay, the only white vegetable except for white asparagus grown in the dark. That kind of makes them the veal of the vegetable world, doesn't it?) Anyway. Cauliflower. I rather like the stuff. It has a beautiful complex structure. I hate to see them hacked up into little bits like vegetable cheese crumbs. I like to take special care to carve it well; to show the beautiful individual florettes or little cross sections like reverse silhouettes of tiny trees. When you cut up a cauliflower, you should start at the bottom. Turn your pristine head, free of grey spots, upside down. Use a thin sharp knife to carve around the base at an angle so you can remove a sort of dreidel-shaped chunk from the bottom. Trim away the leaves to expose the central "trunk" of the cauliflower. From here all the bases of the cauliflower florettes will be visible to trim free. Also, the base is good eats, especially if you are making a soup or saute, so chop up the center into bite sized pieces once its been freed of all its florettes.