I’m sure I am opening myself up to many additional pieces of hatemail and accusations of “zenophobia” [sic], but I’m laying bare last weekend’s Iowa City food diaries anyway, with the ground-breaking observation that Midwesterners eat not-so-great food, and too much of it. (To be fair, I started eating trash on the morning of my departure, so the first two meals listed here were consumed at airports in New York City and Atlanta, respectively. My rationale: in a 24,000-calorie weekend, what’s an extra 2000?)

Friday:
Breakfast: Sausage, egg & cheese Croissan’Wich from Burger King.
Lunch: Fried chicken Caesar at Paschal’s.
Dinner: The Worst Tacos I Have Ever Tasted Outside Of The United Kingdom–in the UK, “fajita” is often pronounced FADGE-it-aah, which pretty much sets the tone for Tex-Mex–at Panchero’s.

Saturday:
Brunch: The Mexicali Alley at Micky’s:a pizza-sized tortilla enclosing a six-egg omelet, black beans, grilled chicken and American cheese, served with a walloping dollop of sour cream and three potatoes’ worth of hash browns. I ate half of it, and then nothing else for the next nine hours.
Dinner: Pork-themed wedding. Iowa’s own La Quercia prosciutto to start; loin and center-cut chops to continue. Chex Mix, Maytag blue, baked beans and potato salad throughout. There was cake, but there wasn’t room. (Pictures of the feast, and of me feasting.)

Sunday:
Brunch: The previous day’s Mexicali Alley was so bad it was good. I ordered it again.
Dinner: Fried chicken sandwich and seasoned fries at Checkers.

What I’m trying to say, boys and girls, is this: for the next few days, I’m eating light.

The distorted reputation and misguided treatment of certain vegetables is one of my perennial peeves. (Longtime readers of this blog will already have encountered my acerbic denouncements of crimes against cruciferae.) I’ll say this for Iowans: they respect iceberg lettuce. And why shouldn’t they? A fresh, crisp head of iceberg, finely shredded and tossed in ponzu, is one of my favourite things to eat. Yet iceberg gets no play on the East Coast, where a “side salad” means insipid baby greens (droopy leaves of young spinach, romaine and mizuna) overwhelmed by balsamic vinaigrette. Just as inexplicably, most people will boil cauliflower, puree it or bury it in a congealed cheese sauce before they’ll eat it raw, and then only with ranch or blue cheese dip. I, for one, love the little albino trees uncooked, their mild, nutty sweetness intact.

I’ve put thin sheets of raw cauliflower front and center in my bastardized carpaccio. The marinated cauliflower does the work of shaved parmesan, and air-cured bresaola stands in–as it often does, in Tuscany–for raw beef.

To slice the cauliflower thin, you’ll need a mandoline, a Japanese slicer or that elusive combo of sharp knife and sure hand. The stalks are easily shaved, but if you want to keep the flowers uncrumbled, you can’t go paper-thin.

Allow the cauliflower cross-sections to bathe for a few minutes in a mixture of vinegar and good olive oil. Drain and assemble on a thin bed of bresaola. Drizzle with parsley oil, made simply by blanching a bunch of fresh parsley in boiling water and whirring it in a blender with some more of that good olive oil. You can strain out the solids, but I rather like the way they look and taste. (This method works for basil and cilantro, too.)

You might want to crack some black pepper over it, but skip the salt. Unless it’s dinner-time and your palate is numbed by wine, the bresaola is plenty salty enough for the cauliflower.

A slice or two of rye bread, and that’s lunch.

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