Smoky roasted cauliflower

Eating well for less is a general goal for many of us, whether we’ve got six-digit annual paychecks or whether we’re subsisting on food stamps. One of the things I like about the Midtown Farmers Market is not only that they take food stamps, but that I see immigrant mothers choosing to spend their limited food stamp resources at a place likely to yield the most healthful results for their family. I’m sorry their means are limited to that extent, but happy that there’s a resource for them like the market.

Not everything at a farmers market is cheap. Meat, for instance, is “value priced,” aka it’s a much better value for a like product at a supermarket, where it’s totally not free. Ditto with fresh berries and tomatoes.

But there are genuine deals at a farmers market at any price. Like grocery stores, farmers markets have different tiers of shelving. While the grocery stores have multiple levels, the farmers markets have just the two levels, and the bargain values are on the bottom shelves or in baskets around the perimeter. Enormous baskets of tomatoes or cucumbers are a big value, as are all the root vegetables down at that level.

Each year there’s a ritual: I spot my first rutabaga of the season, an enormous family-feeding monster for a buck tucked away in a stand on the southwest end. I always exclaim when I see it: Is that a rutabaga? And the Hmong grandfather is always thrilled to see it recognized and happy to sell it to me for what seems to me to be a criminally low price.

It’s that sort of value that’s behind a cookbook aimed at getting people to eat healthfully on SNAP, as the food stamp program is now known. Grad student Leanne Brown’s thesis project was a cookbook that explores what’s possible on $4 a day without resorting to the dollar menu at a fast-food place. Clearly there are some different price points in place where she shopped in New York vs. the Midwest for certain items, but it’s a highly laudable effort at eking out decent food at an unsustainable price point.

Smoky and spicy roasted cauliflower

From “Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day” by Leanne Brown.You can download a free pdf of the cookbook here.

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower, separated into small pieces

2 garlic cloves, unpeeled (I used 5, because)

1 tablespoon melted butter

1 teaspoon smoked  paprika

½ teaspoon cayenne powder

Method

Combine cauliflower, garlic, butter, paprika, cayenne, salt and pepper to taste in a roasting pan. Roast at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. Squeeze out garlic; toss together. 

Rating: A tasty, caramelized side dish. It serves 4. Brown also has a recipe calling for serving the roasted cauliflower in tacos topped with salsa and cheese, which would stretch things a bit further. Clearly you’d need to buy your smoked paprika at a place like Bill’s Imported Foods, where spices are available in bulk, for the pricing to work out.