broccoli

Broccoli Pasta Comeback!

by

Broccoli_pasta
For years, Santa Maria and I had a fallback, no-name weeknight recipe involving broccoli and pasta. It was the kind of thing we could throw together at a moment's notice, but more often than not, I found it lacking. Unless I was completely starving, it tasted poorly conceived, and it gave me the feeling that I had no idea what I was doing.

So I dropped it from my rotation.

But the other day Santa Maria had a massive vegetable craving, and she proposed the dish for lunch. I decided to try making it again, but this time I was armed with experience, and the new issue of Bon Appétit, which has a great article on how to make better pasta. I tried out a few of their suggested a few tricks, such as:

  1. Building a base for the sauce in a sauté pan. (I started with garlic and crushed red peppers.)
  2. Using lots of salt in the pasta water.
  3. Saving the pasta water for the sauce.
  4. Under cooking the pasta, and finishing it in the sauté pan.
  5. Grating in a bunch of cheese into the sauté pan.

I was very pleased with the results. By slightly adjusting my technique, I turned a lousy weeknight dish into a delicious and well rounded meal. It didn't have enough protein for me in the end, but it tasted mighty fine. I'll keep experimenting with the recipe to see if I can add a bit of meat—I'm thinking prosciutto or sausage—to it without upsetting its balance. That's the plan for next time, and with these new techniques, I'm sure I'll continue to get it right. (If you want the full Bon Appétit article, it is available online.)

Naked Broccoli and Pasta

  • 1 head broccoli, washed and cut into floretes
  • 1 teaspoon crushed red peppers, or to taste
  • 6 garlic cloves, peeled, cut in half, and thinly sliced (or to taste)
  • 1/2 cup or more of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
  • Spaghetti

Put the pasta water on to boil.

Cook the pasta to within about two minutes of being finished (a little white inside is perfect) reserving the cooking liquid.

Steam the broccoli until it is tender but firm; set aside.

In a large pan sauté the garlic and peppers in a bit of olive oil.

Once the garlic is soft and about to brown, add the broccoli, and a few ladles of the pasta water.

Add the pasta and continue to cook until the pasta is finished, about a minute longer (add more water if it starts to stick).

Turn the heat off and finish with the cheese. There should only be a bit of liquid, and the strands of pasta and the broccoli should all be coated with it nicely.

Enjoy.

The Freshest Broccoli Ever

by

One of the biggest secrets to cooking well has nothing to do with the stove. It has nothing to do with cookbooks. Nothing to do with cookware. It has to do with shopping.

Cooking with fresh ingredients is easy. Cooking with old one or poor quality ones takes real skill. Look at French cuisine—all those wonderful sauces were created to improve the flavor of things. Why would you need to improve the flavor of something that tasted good in the first place? I like easy things. When I cook, I try to get the freshest ingredients possible.

This weekend, we had the good fortune of being invited to the country. Our friends Jim and Muriel have a house in upstate New York, and they’ve been generously asking us to visit for the past few years. We finally took them up on their offer, and we had a blast.

Humming birds (or as Pinta called them, “Humus birds”) danced at their feeder off their kitchen window. Crickets chirped in the woods beyond the meadow. We swam in their naturally-chlorinated pool, making a sport out of dodging horseflies. Jim and Muriel like to drink and Muriel expertly whipped up cocktails each evening. There’s nothing like the taste of a cold margarita made by someone else. Fresh ingredients are good. Fresh ingredients handled by others are even better. Fresh ingredients handled by someone else involving alcohol are the best.

We brought food on our trip, and I cooked dinner Friday and Saturday nights. The first night, the Greek Tuna Salad increased its list of positive attributes by proving that it travels well (at least the ingredients for it do). The second night, I pan-fried wild salmon fillets (frozen, they travel well too) and experimented with a topping of oil, salt, pepper, and fresh fennel fronds from their garden. I served the fish with a simple mayonnaise-less potato salad  (olive oil, salt and pepper, scallions, and parsley), and steamed, fresh-picked broccoli.

The broccoli came from Jim and Muriel’s deer-proof garden, a fenced in spit of soil at a neighbor’s house. Nina and Pinta picked the broccoli themselves. It was a treat to see them walking into the house holding the green heads up like a bouquet of flowers. Now that’s a fresh ingredient.