Last week, I made a joke about dropping all of my New Year’s resolutions in favor of a commitment to eat 52 different kinds of soup instead. A friend reached out, worried: “Were your other resolutions not soup-oriented?”
I had to prove that I hadn’t been kidnapped and wasn’t crying out for help: “Darling, relax. You know I don’t resolve.”
It was a joke, but it also wasn’t. I have always found January a ridiculous time to lean toward self-improvement, as if while the flowers, bears, and insects rest and get quiet, we should, as animals ourselves, suddenly feel some wellspring of energetic desire to start something new or (shuddering) healthy.
Willpower has never been a strength of mine, and the further into this life I get, the more I see self-denial as a tool of the oppressor. I am, I suppose, also lucky that I really like to eat vegetables.
In her wonderful 2012 book, An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler devotes a significant amount of attention to the way we think about cooking vegetables.
“Our desire to eat fresh vegetables has left us with an idea that vegetables are only good if they’re cooked just before being eaten,” she says. “But many of the best vegetable dishes are created over time.”
Her point, in this portion of a work I return to over and over again for cooking inspiration, is that we should come home from the market with a massive pile of vegetables — leafy greens, roots, seasonal treats that require shucking, shelling, etc. — and set to work cooking them immediately. This, in her mind, is to make sure they all get used, thereby avoiding that terrible moment when you pull a bunch of once beautiful, now limp rainbow chard out of the crisper drawer (a location Adler calls one of the “most inaptly named things in history: I have never seen anything get crisper in one”).
While I think this idea is both romantic and practical, I’ll confess that I rarely have the time to do it. What I have been able to manage is to attempt it in small increments. That’s where my obsession with keeping a few bunches of blanched broccoli rabe in the fridge originated.
Broccoli rabe is a tricky beast. Some people find it to be unpleasantly bitter (a property a quick blanching does a great job neutralizing), and I think some people just aren’t quite sure which kind of food it’s supposed to go with. I use it anywhere I’d use a dark, hardy green like kale or collards, and I find that it crosses cultures in the kitchen with spectacular ease.
Bring a big heavy pot of salted water to a boil — the salt here is key: you want to salt this like pasta water, so it tastes like the sea. Trim any dry or brown tough bits off the very bottom of the stems of two bunches of broccoli rabe and then toss them into the pot. Give them a stir with some tongs to make sure they all touch hot water. I like to cook rabe for two to five minutes, until it’s pleasantly tender. We’re going beyond crisp-tender here because we want it to be fast and easy to use later.
When it’s there, shock it in a bowl of ice water or drain it in a colander in the sink under the coldest water possible, tossing it around until it all feels cool to the touch. It’s the cold shock, in concert with the saltiness of the blanching water, that will keep your broccoli rabe bright green no matter where it goes next. Chop it all up, toss it in a container, and put it in the fridge until later.
Now you’ve done the hard part. You can use the hot blanching water to cook more vegetables or some pasta, if you’d like, but you’ve already accomplished a lot — you’ve made something that’s good for you easier to finish later.
This has been a tough winter so far. Most of us have gotten sick in one way or another, and storms and wars have raged. I think tending gently to ourselves in quiet ways like this is one of the few tethers we can reliably count on. So, if you want to pour that blanching water into the sink and sit down to read a book instead of doing more work, I think we all understand.
Now, when the mood strikes, you can sauté your rabe with a few cloves of chopped garlic and a small handful of chili flakes in sizzling hot olive oil. Then you’re just a squeeze of lemon juice over the top away from the perfect side dish to a big heavy lasagna. You can slip it into a hot pan with some ginger and scallions (or a tablespoon of ginger-garlic paste), then give it a drizzle of oyster sauce, and you have the perfect foil to a spicy curry or stir-fried noodles. You can roast oyster mushrooms with thyme, salt, and olive oil and toss with the rabe, a can of big white beans, and some vinaigrette to prepare a room temperature salad ready whenever the mood strikes. Fold the rabe into an omelet with cheddar, or a frittata. Or, if all of that feels like too much work, just pile it onto some crusty bread with a smear of ricotta and a few scrambled eggs.
You will be both feeding and nourishing yourself (and whoever else gets to enjoy the fruits of your thinking ahead), adding a vegetable and eating something delicious, and tending to yourself in advance so that, ultimately, you can take it a little easier. You will also, as Adler notes near the end of her chapter on cooking vegetables in advance, have given yourself some room to experiment with lower stakes because, after all, the hard part was already done.
“By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once,” says Adler. “You will also have had a number of interesting conversations. You will have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You’ll have tasted a particularly soft, cold, vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjugations, brushing up.”
