The Business of Broccoli for Breakfast

Dear Tamar:

I’ve signed up, for the first time, for a veggie subscription from a local farm. I’m a little nervous. I like the idea of savoury porridge, but it’s easier to quickly add a few nuts and a splash of maple syrup to my oatmeal on a busy morning. I want to love salads, but I don’t find them filling enough. I find Yotam Ottolenghi inspiring, but I have a toddler underfoot while I cook. How can I do these farm-fresh vegetables justice? How can I incorporate them into more meals? I guess what I’m asking is, how do I learn to be the kind of person who loves vegetables for what they are?

-Broccoli for breakfast

Dear Broccoli for breakfast,

There are so many questions facing the world right now that it is refreshing to have one I can answer. I’m pleased to share that all you must do to incorporate the bounty of your vegetable box into your meals—from broccoli at breakfast to leeks at lunch and daikon at dinner—is to narrow your focus: your sole task is to transform each vegetable and herb in the box from raw to cooked.

This cooking can take different forms, depending on the box contents, (and will mean something different for herbs) but will always have the following in common:

• Your technique will be simple, requiring one step.

• Your main ingredients will be vegetable, salt, and heat.

I’ll get to the reason for my insistence in a moment. First, the two simplest ways are to boil and to roast. I hear flickers of protests that steaming a vegetable is easier yet, and that without stir-frying, another reader’s weeknight dinners would be lost. I stand firm, with the help of this clarification: for the purpose of incorporating vegetables into daily meals, boiling and roasting are techniques non-pareil.

To boil: Fill a big pot with water, bring it to a boil, add a handful of salt, then stir and taste the water. Add more, if needed, until the water tastes like pleasant seawater or well-seasoned soup. Now, boil vegetables by type, keeping broccoli with broccoli and leek with leek, but using the same pot of water for successive batches. Boil vegetables from least starchy to most starchy. This rule isn’t hard and fast. If you’re not sure, don’t fret. Guess.

To roast: Set the oven to 400 degrees. Mix your cut vegetable—again keeping type with type—with enough oil to lightly coat each surface and salt them so that you’re actually seasoning them. Spread them on a tray in a single layer, and roast, again in batches. They’re done when you can’t resist a second bite of the one you try. If you can resist, let them continue cooking.

To prepare vegetables for either boiling or roasting: Aim to turn the entire head or root or bulb into pieces of similar size to each other. If you cut broccoli into spears, let the spears be of nearly identical size, so that they cook in the same amount time. If you cut broccoli into slices—which you might for roasting—let the slices be the same thickness, again for uniform cooking. Try for pieces that are neither so large that you’ll need to chop them again before eating, nor so small that they’re hard to scoop from a pot or a roasting pan.

Some vegetables would rather be boiled than roasted and vice versa. Leafy vegetables, like kale, for example, are too willing to fry the instant they enter the oven to risk it. They do better in a boiling pot. Beets need time to develop their sugars and benefit from an hour in the oven in a covered roasting pan with a little bit of water. Higher sugar vegetables, like squashes, are especially delicious when cooked on high heat in the oven. Many, like broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, and potatoes are ambi-vessel-lous—a word I’ve just coined to mean equally happy in either. You can experiment. You can read. Just don’t worry too much, because for the most part, if a vegetable is well seasoned and cooked through, it will be good!

There will be herbs in your box, as well, which do not want to be boiled or roasted. To ensure these get habitually used, wash and chop their leaves and mix them into olive oil or butter, remembering to season whichever with salt. You’ll have a drizzling oil—an herby sauce that will improve whatever you drizzle it on—or herb butter, which no steak has ever been diminished by, and by which many have been improved.

I give detailed instructions on how to do this all of this at once in An Everlasting Meal. If you can’t find time for one stretch, divide the task up into two or three sessions, never losing sight of your goal.

Once you’re finished, you’ll have made each of the vegetables and herbs easy to use in any dish in any meal. You will have done the one small thing you need to do to make any of the next things possible. There are endless hoary chestnuts getting at this: One step at a time; Create atomic habits; Put one foot in front of another; Day by day. They are at least as relevant if just as hoary in the kitchen. Take the small first step and the proceeding ones will follow.

What are the next steps, then, since you still don’t have a savory porridge or a salad? They’re to add your cooked vegetables to anything and everything you make. Your cooked vegetables are no harder to add to porridge than nuts and maple syrup. Any can be combined with cooked farro and perhaps a bit of goat cheese to make filling salads. Cooked vegetables in hand, flip through the books of Yotam Ottolenghi to find additions you can make to your dishes to imitate his—a sprinkle of za’atar over your roasted cauliflower, a drizzle of techina over your beets. None of these small flourishes will take nearly as long as it would have to start from raw ingredients and the recipe itself. Spoon cooked vegetables into rice, mix it through, and eat it for lunch. Spread them on toast—an avocado toast, but cauliflower. Use them as pasta sauce. Drizzle your herb sauce over eggs, pasta, soup, rice, beans, meat, fish…

Dear cook, in uncertain times, take comfort in this: Focus on the first available decision—will you will face your breakfast-time broccoli raw, or face broccoli you’ve already nudged along to make breakfast easier? There will be another decision to make soon enough, and you’ll be in good form to make it.