Interlude with cauliflower
posted in Family, Miscellaneous |I love cauliflower. Tender, delicate, tightly woven off-white buds covered with butter or shredded cheddar cheese…yum. However, we don’t eat it very often. Mostly, we just don’t think of it.
OmegaDad got a hankering for tempura recently. So he purchased mushrooms and broccoli and zucchini and cauliflower, hauled out the boneless skinless chicken breasts, did some research on Teh Google, and prepared a luscious tempura meal last night. The batter, alas, was somewhat starchy, so only the zucchini (being full of H2O) came out with the perfect tempura crust; everything else was slightly chewy rather than crispy. But add some sweet-and-hot sauce, some teriyaki or char sui sauce, and we were dipping fiends.
Then tonight we had steak and noodles and plain ol’ cauliflower with butter.
An hour later I came to the realization of just why we don’t eat cauliflower very often.
Actually, if I had been thinking, that realization would have struck me last night, when I was wandering around the house wondering just what was causing my unusual bloatiness, with disturbing thoughts of how the maternal side of the family has a tendency towards uterine cancer (one symptom of which is sudden onset of bloatiness). Yes, I do have a slight leaning towards mental hypochondria–why do you ask??
But tonight, when my abdomen distended outward like a taut balloon within an hour after dinner, my brain finally acknowledged the two-by-four that was thwacking against my head. I knew the eternal truth: I love cauliflower, but cauliflower does not love me in return.
Believe me when I say "distended outward like a taut balloon", I am not exaggerating. OmegaDotter, when presented with the evidence (see photo), gasped and said, "Omigod! Mom! You look like you’re pregnant!" Then she poked at my tummy and watched with interest as her fingertip bounced off. OmegaDad made a smart-alecky remark about how he wanted to know who the parents were if I were pregnant. I merely marveled at how quickly those lovely, tender florets of the veggie had transformed themselves into a veritable explosion of gas in my gut.
As the dotter and I did our normal bedtime routine, first she asked her "one question" (why did the cauliflower make me look like I was pregnant? entailing a quick discussion of food, digestion and gas), and then she kept bouncing up from her pillow to look at me and ask me if I was going to fart or burp now. When I did, she’d bounce up again to ask if all the gas was gone yet.
She thought it was hilariously funny. It took her a while to go to sleep. She kept snickering.
As I sit here hours later, still producing copious amounts of gas, I don’t think it’s funny at all.
Which is, of course, why I decided to share my intestinal distress with the myriad of intimate strangers who will arrive here guided by Teh Google when they search on "cauliflower gas" or "cauliflower farts" or "cauliflower burps" or some such combination.
I’m sure they (and you) will be happy to know that someone has done a scholarly mathematics paper all about the fractal factor of cauliflower and broccoli. What the hell is a "fractal factor"? I’m not quite sure (I think it has to do with how many times the patterns repeat themselves, and I leave my readers to dig through the various references to figure it out), but this delightful piece of information is a mighty testament to the wonders of the intertubes and the weirdness that can be scholarly mathematics…
