Green spears: broccoli

I seem to have been inspired by childhood vegetable stories this week. First spinach, and now broccoli.
Remember how hard our parents, grandparents, or other caregivers tried to get us to eat the stuff? Like spinach, it was something that was good for us, so we were supposed to eat it, preferably at least a few times a week (Calves' liver was another one of those things. Allah be praised that that one is off the books). Anyway, I remember one of the tricks that parents used was the "Make food FUN" trick. You were encouraged to take the spears of broccoli, insert them into something soft, like mashed potatoes, so that you could say "Oh, look Hollingsworth, darling. There's a little forest of broccoli on your plate. Wouldn't it be fun to just eat all those trees?"

Don't try to fool kids. You can put trees on potatoes, you can serve it "ants on a tree" style, with fried chopped pork, or however else you serve it, if it doesn't taste good, a kid is NOT GOING TO EAT IT. No one really knows what tastes good to a kid but a kid, and more importantly, WHY something tastes good or doesn't. But let's face it: we ALL know certain things. As adults, we can fool ourselves into thinking we like something and eat it. I eat a bowl of high fiber root and twig cereal every morning. I find myself saying "MMM. Nice and sweet. Nice and crunchy."

I HATE the stuff. But I eat it because it's good for me. There is nothing I can do to fix it to make me like it. That is NOT true about broccoli. There is a lot of badly cooked broccoli out there, and let's see if we can fix it.

Everyone is going to say right away that THE problem with broccoli is that it is overcooked. That's one problem. To me, the other problem, equally bad, is UNDERCOOKING broccoli. See, we were all taught that overcooking vegetables drains them of their nutrients and you'd be better off drinking the water they were cooked in. That's true for SOME vegetables, and broccoli is one of them. But it is equally true that in order to make nutrients available, many vegetables have to be cooked long enough. Otherwise, they stay embedded in that mysterious ingredient "dietary fiber" and leave, when it does, without doing anything good for you.

So, the first thing to do with broccoli is to cook it properly. When you get a head of broccoli, you're familiar of course with the "florettes" at the top, and the big, thick stem. It's the easiest thing in the world to cut off that big florette head, cut the individual florettes apart, and then cook them, tossing the stem. Well, if you do that, you just doubled the cost of what you paid for that broccoli. You can use that stem, it just takes a bit more time. Look at it for a minute. Look at the cut end. You'll see a structure that is reminiscent of the cross section of a tree. There is almost a "bark" around a stem of broccoli. That is non edible. But what's underneath is really tasty - better tasting, to me, than the florettes. So get out a vegetable parer, and cut that stuff away. You can see the layer go off, so it's easy to do. Then, just cut the peeled stem into pieces that are about as big as your florettes.

You were probably taught to steam broccoli. You probably have a s teamer basket that you use for nothing else: you pile up too much broccoli in it, put it in a pot with an inch or two of water, and cook. Then you take it out, dump the broccoli in a bowl, sprinkle lemon juice on it, and crunch, crunch crunch.

YUCK, right? Well, if you're going to steam it, be my guest. But steam it long enough. "Long enough" is long enough so that a sharp knife tip can go into it, with just a bit of resistance. I find that it is easier to do this by cooking the broccoli in a big pot of boiling salted water, rather than by steaming it. The broccoli has more room to move around in, and it actually cooks faster (Review time: when we cook broccoli, do we cover the pot, or leave it uncovered? If you're not sure, cover it one time and then see what happens to that beautiful green color.)

Broccoli cooked this way is just fine, especially if you're eating highly spiced or heavily flavored things with it. But if you're doing something like a grilled piece of meat or fish, and some potatoes, you may want to consider adding some flavor component to the dish. One of my favorites, stolen from Chinese cooking, is sesame. While the broccoli is boiling away, get a DRY frying pan, and heat it up, with no fat in it at all, and add a hefty three tablespoons or so of sesame seeds. Keep shaking the pan over medium heat, because these guys will burn fast. And they will continue to cook after they are off the heat. So, the minute you smell sesame, get em off the heat and dump the seeds into a cold bowl. Let them sit until the broccoli is ready. Drain it in a collander and then get a pan ready with a few tablespoons of oil. If you're not going to use sesame oil as explained below, use olive oil. If you are using the sesame oil, use vegetable.

Heat up the oil, and just turn the broccoli in it a few times. Then sprinkle in the seeds. If you like, pour a little dark sesame oil over the whole thing, and you're done.

You can dress up broccoli with a lot of things. The preserved lemons I wrote about are good. So are sun dried tomatoes, as is the ubiquitous cream sauce of spinach. And if you are feeling especially virtuous, use that lemon juice. With well cooked broccoli, it will taste good. You may not feel like you're not missing anything, but you won't be unhappy.

Try your own variations on broccoli and share them with the gang here. COME ON. We're waiting....