Abundance - a challenge
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
abundunce - "the situation in which there is more than enough of something" or "the quality of having what you want in life" Cambridge English Dictionary
Yesterday we lunched with our friends with the superabundant garden. We over indulged in the most delicious food and wine, which has led to me feeling marginally poorly - mild alcohol poisoning to be blunt. On top of the wonderful food - the best lamb shank tagine I have ever tasted, and some orangey poached pears, not to mention the cheese and the starters and the chocolate - I was also given a carrier bag of garden produce. This is just a very small sample. And yes that is romanesco broccoli, which I have never cooked before. I mean it's rare and expensive in the shops, So sort of wow. Freshly cut yesterday. Maybe not quite as brilliantly lime-green, pointy and fractal as you see in classy photographs, but real - and fresh, fresh, fresh.
In addition to this, I was given two kinds of kale, a big bunch of silver beet, rhubarb and lemons. The two romanesco would have been abundance enough, but now I have superabundance. It's a challenge - how to use them all up before they lose their fresh glory? No doubt I shall be considering them here on the blog in the near future.
Today there is the additional challenge of that alcohol poisoning so what to do? I mean I'm veering towards comfortably bland in taste. Soothing, not exciting - maybe the silver beet and some ricotta in some form?
But no I decided that the romanesco would be the starting point because - well I've never cooked it before. And no I shan't be using both of those heads, because there are only two of us - and it will be the smaller one on the right that I choose today. And I would love to somehow incorporate that parsley into the mix.
So I started to look - beginning with my favourite source - The Guardian - and there was Rachel Roddy with two similar but different suggestions - one vegetarian, one not. In the first one Broccoli ripassati with olive oil, garlic and chilli she tells us that this is more a technique than a recipe, as indeed I discovered as I searched further for ideas. As well as it being a technique for romanesco it also became obvious that the recipe is equally valid for other kinds of broccoli and broccolini - and cauliflower too. She discovered the technique in a restaurant, realising that it resulted in:
"broccoli so tender it was creamy, glistening with olive oil, garlic and enough chilli to give heat, but not a blaze. It was soft, lively and delicious."
The fundamental technique is to cook your romanesco in water - all of it, but cut into pieces - until very soft. Having removed your romanes to continue with it's next stage, you cook your pasta in the same water, whilst you fry some garlic and chilli in a fair amount of olive oil, add the romanesco and some of its water, and stir around, and finally add the pasta and some of the water. Serve with Parmesan of course.
Simple but sort of not, and also open to an almost infinite number of variations such as adding anchovies or processing the romanesco rather than just moving it around the pan with the garlic and chilli.
The other recipe that she posted was Pasta with broccoli and sausage inspired by:
"a variation, one that would have pleased my one-time flatmate, whose answer to every savoury culinary dilemma was 'put a sausage and a glass of wine in it'"
Wine? Do I need more wine even if it is cooked, thus losing the alcohol? I definitely don't want to open a bottle, but there may be a tiny bit of red wine leftover from David's wine group.
But sausage - yes. That will please David, who is not quite as keen a vegetarian as I. Of course she tells us we can use guanciale as well, but that's very expensive and I have sausages in the freezer. At first I thought I could use chorizo sausage instead of adding chilli - but David doesn't really like chilli, so in the end I plumped for some Coles Margaret River shiraz sausages - which might well go with the leftover shiraz, I have just thought. And dare I squeeze in an anchovy with the garlic - a sliced green chilli as well - they're not hot?
Then, as I was searching for the sausages, I had another brainwave - because there were some frozen homemade gnocchi - so it will be gnocchi not pasta.
Having decided on the technique, if not the exact recipe I went back to the computer to look for other variations and there were of course many because this is obviously a standard dish in Italy - particularly around Rome I think, to which romanesco is native apparently. Common additions were anchovies, olive oil - plentiful, garlic and chilli - a standard Italian accompaniment for pasta all over the country with the emphasis shifting depending where you are. Other occasional suggestions were ricotta, capers, nuts, even sultanas. The romanesco, was sometimes not cooked until silky, but merely tossed in all those other things, so that you had pasta mixed with bits of broccoli rather than a smooth sauce.
For her Orrecchiette with romanesco Anna Jones in The Guardian added some fennel seeds to her flavourings, and also then told us that:
"I flash-fry the romanesco leaves
with chilli and garlic to save them from being wasted and to add a pleasing crunch on top."
Sometimes - as here - in Sylvia Cicolino/Gourmet Traveller's Lasagne with romesco - the romanesco - either in pieces or as a sauce, can be used as a kind of stuffing in things like canneloni and crespolini and sometimes it became a kind of cauliflower cheese. Because - well you can do anything with romanesco that you can do with cauliflower or broccoli. As in the three examples below: Torta di patate e broccoli - Recipe by Piero Drago and Jacopo Ricci via Maria Pasquale/delicious. - which is a kind of Italian bubble and squeak; Romanesco broccoli fritters - Emiko Davies/Gourmet Traveller and Broccoli romanesco with anchovy sauce - Maggie Beer/Facebook - a video that did not involve pasta at all.
Nobody thought of using parsley as well however. But I do want to incorporate it because at the moment it looks so gloriously lush - and yes - abundant. But I know that probably by tomorrow it will be turning yellow and dropping. Perhaps I should add it to the cooking romanesco as it nears the end of its time in the pot. Or chop it and add it right at the end - perhaps with a sqeeze of lemon. Always add lemon somebody said.
Thanks for the opportunity Monika. I'll try to remember to take a photograph of the finished dish.
YEARS GONE BY
August 20
2025 - Nothing
2024 - Seeds
2023 - A fridge-raid tart
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - What's going to go off?
2016 - Nothing
Looking forward to this. Will remind you to take a photo. Yummy prospect!🤗