Growing and Eating a Gaudy Purple Cauliflower

While not the most prolific vegetable in my upstate New York garden, the cauliflower is so delightfully odd-looking and so terribly toothsome, that I always like to buy a six-pack of seedlings each spring to intersperse among my plants.


This year my local farmer offered the Graffiti purple cauliflower variety so I snapped some up and coddled them throughout my growing season. Only two of my six Graffitis formed heads. Here's the first one in all its glory, nestled among my autumnal asparagus stalks.


The color of this cauliflower is a deep magenta and the florets are spectacular on a raw vegetable platter. I tried cooking up half of my first Graffiti to see how it would change color when cooked, and it was a weird shade of blue (it's the plate on the right in the photo below), so I'm just going to keep the second cauliflower (still out in my patch, a very cold hardy plant) for my crudite plate.



I'm sending this post about the purple cauliflower I grew to Weekend Herb Blogging, now in its fifth year. This weekly blog event celebrates the edible members of the Vegetable Kingdom and was started by Kalyn's Kitchen. Now headquartered by Haalo of Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once, this informative and always tasty roundup always surprises me with exotic plant ingredients I never heard of before or with new ways of preparing more common vegetables. I am delighted that I will once again serve as guest host for this Weekend Herb Blogging next week, so I will dig out some more vegetable favorites to blog about.

This week's WHB roundup will be hosted by Anh, of A Food Lover's Journey. Anh is a Vietnamese ex-patriate living in Melbourne, Australia, and she presents many Southeast Asian recipes and new culinary delights on her beautifully-photographed blog. I have bookmarked her latest post involving a recipe for Gluten-Free Mango Clafouti that looks delicious! Stop by Anh's blog after the Sunday deadline for WHB #261 to see all the great entries.