Ahh, broccoli; how I do love thee. I’m not sure I should admit to the beginning of that love affair, because I’m afraid to besmirch my reputation as the “gourmet” cook I’ve always claimed to be. After all, the only broccoli I ever experienced on that Midwestern farm where I grew up was frozen, so how can I explain my great admiration except to confess that I probably loved the Velveeta melted on it more!
Still there was something about those funny-looking green spears that I found wonderful; they looked like the trees I drew on my pictures of pointy-roofed houses with red birds flitting about and the big yellow sun’s rays beaming onto the whole picture from the left side. And there was that moment when they were being cooked that they were the most glorious shade of green, almost luminous and bright, as though the vegetable combined both the green of nature and the yellow of the sun’s rays.
When I graduated from college, my one requirement for a place to settle was the availability of fresh broccoli in the neighborhood grocery, which pretty much meant I had to settle in suburban Kansas City on the Kansas side, and I could never move to the small town where I worked the bulk of my teaching career. How I moved from frozen to fresh broccoli, however, is an event I can’t remember, but I suspect it had something to do with the number of PBS cooking series I watched avidly in the seventies—several being resurrected now on the Cooking Channel which launched back on Memorial Day weekend this year. My, it’s nice to hear Julia trill and gasp her way through reruns of the French Chef/Julia Child and Company!
At any rate, I’m figuring it was seeing Julia, or more likely Jacques Pepin, peel the stems of the spears which made light dawn for me. “Well, hey, it isn’t just the tree part that would be good, then??” And from there, I went to deciding I liked broccoli only blanched, and not steamed, and so I devised a blanching method that suited both my desire for an evenly cooked product and my tendency to categorize things. I cut off the little “trees” at the top of the spear and broke them off from each other where they were joined, and, subsequently, placed them into piles on the cutting board, big and little. Then I peeled the stems, placing them horizontal to the board so that I could cut straight down with my knife—faster and more efficient, and certainly not as ridiculous as that silly vegetable peeler! Then it was either cutting the stem through horizontally or slicing it into chunks, depending upon how thick it was. It was again probably Julia or Jacques who taught me to bring lots of water to the boil and salt it copiously, but the system of dropping in the stems first and letting them boil for a minute or two before I dropped in the “bigger trees” pile from my board is all my invention. . .at least, I think it is!
When you do this, it’s important to get all the “sides” of the little tree parts into the water as it’s boiling because that’s what sets the color, and if you just let the pieces float, they won’t cook evenly. Finally, you finish up, a couple of minutes later, with the “smaller tree” pile, and when one of those smaller trees can be pierced with a knife, it’s time to abandon the ship and get that vegetable drained, cuz it’s done. . .NOW! It isn’t long cooking; you can’t mess around, and it really IS two minutes between drops of stems and tree piles.
I was so happy to discover that my daughter would eat raw broccoli stems when she was very small. Somehow I felt that meant I was better than the average mother and blessed, as well. So, it made perfect sense to raise her believing that one of the two vegetables on your plate at suppertime had to be green—another of my cardinal rules. She was raised believing it so firmly that when she was a freshman in college and her fellow band members held a potluck pre-Thanksgiving dinner to which she took mashed potatoes, she filled her plate, poised her fork, and then burst into anguished dismay, “I can’t eat this; there’s nothing green on the plate!” Ahh, mother guilt. . .a great tool for raising children!
I am convinced, however, that even though there is a genetic tendency towards breast cancer in my family, I’m now 61, and I have never been diagnosed. It’s all that fresh broccoli, I’m tellin’ ya!
You can dress up the broccoli after you’ve cooked it by shocking it in ice water immediately as you drain it and then save the pan in which you cooked it for reheating. Just as you’ve pulled the chicken out of the oven (see #2 - The Protein Which Never Fails) to rest for its ten minutes, pour a bit of olive oil in the cooking pan, and let it heat for a minute while you smash a clove of garlic and throw it in to flavor the oil, actually peeling and chopping it if you want that much garlic flavor. When you can feel a bit of heat rising from the oil in the pan, and particularly smell the garlic, throw in the drained broccoli and turn it fast in the oil, taking a couple of seconds to grind on some pepper or sprinkle in a pinch of red pepper flakes. This is a particularly welcome technique for your broccoli spears at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner. Peel the stems of whole broccoli spears as much as you can without tearing off flowerettes at the top. Cut each spear of broccoli in half vertically, and use your biggest cooking pan so that you have plenty of water in which to cook the broccoli. Salt the water liberally. When you’re finished cooking—and pay attention so that you undercook and keep that glorious green—save the pan and clear off your cooktop to do whatever else you need to do there. Ten minutes before you’re calling people to the table, do the oil reheat as previously described, and if you start a little earlier heating up the oil, you’ll have time to add some red bell pepper strips! Talk about “green on the plate!” You’ll have no problem feeling healthy as well as beautiful, and you certainly won’t feel guilty about not having eaten anything green at YOUR Thanksgiving Dinner!
Next time: a meal planning guide
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