Romanesco

Romanesco broccoli is fractal-shaped.

To be honest, this hasn't been my Garden of Eden year. […] The lettuce turned bitter and bolted. The Green Comet broccoli was good, but my coveted Romanescos never headed up.

The broccolo romanesco, once found only in Rome, is now being cultivated in Brittany and elsewhere, and people who had never heard of it a few years ago feel free to change its name to romanesco, as in, 'I bought a nice romanesco at the market; now what do I do with it?' (Actually for years Roman vegetable vendors called it broccolo romano and only romanesco recently.) […] Calling it simply romanesco is like calling French fries 'French.' This is serious because romanesco is needed to modify artichokes and zucchini, for which it indicates both local cultivation and a specific variety of vegetable – striated, firm zucchine romanesche and the large globe artichokes known as carciofi romaneschi.

This beautiful vegetable looks rather like a green cauliflower designed by a mathematician and has lime-green 'spiralled' curds. The curds are nutty and tasty, and romanesco is worth growing just for its good looks. You can use romanesco in the same ways that you would normally use cauliflower but the flavour is sweeter and they look far more impressive. I try to leave them in large pieces when serving them because they're so beautiful.

You can use squash standbys such as zucchini and crookneck in this recipe, but it's even more beautiful with a mix of colors and shapes, from sunny yellow pattypans to ridged Romanescos to the perfectly round, aptly named eightball.

Romanesco was my gateway cauli and I've never stopped growing it. Not a variety as much as its own thing, Romanesco is a cauliflower to the French, a calabrese to the Italians. […] Visually, it may be the most remarkable thing you can grow: it is made up of lime-green mini-spirals that coil around themselves in fractal formation.