broccoli hash recipe

We have broccoli here. In fact, in January right after all the holiday meat eating and buying, the butcher comes home from the shop and mutters, (although his muttering is not sotto voce)

"the damned Broccoli and lentil eaters are going to ruin us!

The broccoli here is gigantic. And it costs a euro. 1 euro  a head. A head whose diameter is 12 inches without the outer leaf corona.

It is served in pasta, it is served as fritters, it is served as cutlets, it is boiled, mashed, olive oiled and pignoli-ed. It is baked, it is parmegian-ed it is worked.

I might otherwise say revered or honored. But no. Sure a truffle comes with a pedigree and a pretension, so does the costata (rib eye) we sell at the shop.

But the broccoli does not come with the anxiety or awe which a beautiful peice of meat, or even a sugo that artfully extracts the flavor from a bone or a scrap of meat brings.  The Broccoli comes abundantly and inexpensively as a worker. The siciliane hustle and bustle  days after the last connolo   and all the steak has been eaten to fill the larder once again with this corona of green and sulphur.

The weather here is temperate . Kind even.   The rest of Italy , the rest of the world is in political and climate tryanny. Here though, not a drop of rain, instead a cool breeze carrying the perfume of love. Freshly  sprouting green everywhere from the hills.  This is the ante-spring.  In Sicily we have a season just before spring, after winter. 

And The Broccoli and the Artichoke are the king and queen of this season. 

Super abundant and one euro a head.

The Broccoli is in residence in January. He is the proletariat's king.

And the siciliane nonne  of  a certain generation make busy.

It is not a rush, like it is with fagiolini --the french kind, haricots verts,- whose sweetness when just picked is so fleeting that the whole house is called in to snip and clip the ends. The faster we work, the better it is.

No, for  Broccoli  there is no pretense.

Call it humble. But even that is a writer's short cut.

For me it is gratitude, yes, certainly, but something different. Agreement. Broccoli is here because broccoli agreed to be here for us when we needed him. Broccoli is so loyal that there is not even the briefest moment of "what if... without broccoli"  It just is impossible to consider... Can you imagine sicily without a lemon? No. For the siciliana she can not imagine her  winter  without the Broccoli.

Without it the winter to spring months would be only dried beans and pasta . An occassional winter lettuce, the bitter greens and the larder of sauce and garlic from the summer.

Coming up the stairs, with the staples: bread, some milk and a huge bag filled with Broccoli, my mother in law sets about  to work the Broccoli. The pasta pot gets filled with water. The aromas of sauteeing red onion and olive oil from the  big bottle  (the good stuff she hides) fill the kitchen.

I avoid her.  And sadly I avoid her broccoli.

We just don't work together. I have faded back into the furnishings in her house , as she prefers it, and I have been happy for the invisibility as I am completely overwhelmed with my studies for my upcoming 10hour certification exam in the States.  So I no longer come into the kitchen to photograph her or feed her ego as an apology for "stealing her son".

But I relent.

I find some reason to make a cup of tea, clean a spoon,

fuss with the laundry on the terrace.

 I find her already  sitting down to grate the grana padana..  The broccoli has been boiled and added to the onion, and the garlic, mashed to the ideal consistency. The broccoli sauce is ready. The pasta pot is boiling poised for the rigatoni, precisely 12 minutes before we expect my husband to arrive home from the shop.

"Call your husband, tell him i want to know when he comes home. The pasta needs to be ready"

I say nothing. I call.

Ordinarily I would ignore the request, having sworn to not enable their codependence.  This afternoon though, I am thinking only of my self.

 When a sauce with broccoli is just the right texture, it hangs on the noodle with relaxed  tenacity. It will happily luxuriate on the rigatoni, but if you just nudge it a little, she will slide right into your mouth.  So sauce without pasta or sauce with pasta.  Even a good bolognese with chunks of meat will still have a thin quality - that if you ate it without the pasta, you would feel it's absence.  But the Broccoli. Sweet Broccoli no.

He is the Lord of many Manners.

So, will I post a recipe for the Pasta sauce? Yes.

Today? No. But I will.

And dear readers I might even ask for her recipe.

This morning there was broccoli already boiled in a bowl. 

 And this is what I have to share with you all today.

1 1/2cups boiled broccoli

1 tsp olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

One poached egg

add the olive oil the a hot skillet, add the broccoli, mash and sautee until it achieves the consistency of  oatmeal. Keep pressing it down so that it all holds together. add salt and pepper.

Fill a cereal bowl with it,

gently add your poached egg.

Take photo graphs, share with your friends and write about it.

Or just feel the loyalty and devotion of the proletariat king's crown set down before  his people.

All contents copyright 2004-2011. All rights reserved.