Change Your (Cruciferous) Fate!

I had been holding my breath for last weekend.  Weeks and weeks for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, months for Brave.  ALVH will wait for the next post as I still need to go lied down in a cool, dark place and practice calm breathing every time I think of that stinking mess of a celluloid disappointment.  But Brave.....

A young Scottish princess seeks to change her fate, avoid an arranged marriage, forge her own destiny...

And does.  With her mother.  Not with a man.  Not saved at the last minute by her big strong beau who’s won her over.  NO last minute glorious wedding.  

Familiar?

It begins with a mother instructing her teenage daughter in duty and protocol and ends in a beautiful friendship between two women that left me weeping several times through the film.  Each character is a finely crafted personality, nothing is tritely cookie-cutter. Throughout literature and film, conflict is carried as close to the end as possible, each person wrapped in their own spite, sorrow, fear and anger until the last possible moment for redemption when 1) The hero saves the day, Boy and Girl revel in True Love and Disapproving Parent joyfully accepts newly repented children; or 2) The fate of the pained falls far beyond salvation and Lives are ruined, Loves lost and Lessons are learned, which tend to become the motivation driving the plot of Case 1.


Brave has lesson learned from the past, but also fallible personalities who can immediately regret their harsh words and rash actions, as real people do.  The family is not perfect, the resolution not facile.  It is dark and perilous and Merida is a breathtaking heroine, especially when paired with her mother.  


As GingerMan posits, the true test of feminist strength in plotting comes when two female characters carry a story and do not focus on the romantic involvement of a Prince Charming or his necessity for resolution and salvation.  Brave is all skirts, even the ones on the blokes, and in battle, all skirts are equal.

Another masterpiece from Disney-Pixar.  Bring your kids and your tissues.  Bring your honey and tissues, this is some seriously bad-ass animation!  The texturing, lighting, movement of hair and fabric and facial expressions is exquisite.  D-P are pushing the envelope ever further toward perfection and this movie is absolutely BREATHTAKING (have I said that enough?) in it’s beautifully rendered Scottish medieval backdrop.

What better to finish a great movie night than Broccoli Salad, V 1.0 (oh, and some pulled pork!)?

We begin at the beginning before getting fancy with all the variations mentioned in the last post, and I’ve only just realised that I forgot the onion.  It is included in the recipe. I was in a state, is all I’m sayin’--Go see a woman become a Woman, Brave and True, then come home and snarf this down on a hot summer night!

BROCCOLI SALAD, V. 1.0

PREP TIME: 30 MINS

COOK TIME: BROCCOLI- 3 MINS / BACON 5-7 MINS

CHILL TIME: 15+ MINS

SALAD:

• 1 Med Head Broccoli:  Pare down to bite-size florets, then skin the stem and cut into bite-size pieces-you’ll be pleased when it’s cooked- it’s crunchy and sweet!
• 3+ Strips Bacon (Follow your porky-lovin’ heart)
• 1/4 C Yellow Raisins OR Brown Rasins OR Dried Cranberries 
• 1/4 C Chopped Yellow OR Red Onion

DRESSING:

• 2/3 C Light Sour Cream
• 3T+ Sugar
• 1T White Wine Vinegar OR Apple Cider Vineagar
• 1/4 tsp Kosher Salt
• Several Grates Fresh Nutmeg OR
• 1/8 tsp Ground Nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp Fresh Ground White Pepper 

INSTRUCTIONS:

Blanch the Broccoli:  A) Fill a large pot 2/3 full with water, set on the stove on highest heat and get to a near-boil;  B) Set a colander in the sink and have a bowl of ice handy;  C) When the pot comes to near-boil, turn down to medium, then pop the broccoli into the CALM, NOT BOILING WATER.  Stand over it for 3 minutes, watching the color change.  You're looking for an immediate brightening of color-3 minutes, that’s it. D) Remove pot from stove IMMEDIATELY AND DUMP BROCCOLI INTO COLANDER;  

E) Run cold water over broccoli and toss in colander for a count of 20, turn off water, then dump the ice into the colander and gently mix the broccoli and ice then LEAVE IT TO COOL.  Make sure you keep the broccoli in the colander so the water and ice all drain away, preventing water-logging.  The point of blanching is to take the raw edge off veggies and convert a bit of their starch to sugar, giving them a lovely bit of sweetness and softening them just a TINY bit.  They should be bright green and very crisp, but the florets will have lost the characteristic rubberiness of their raw state and the peeled stem will be a heavenly, crunchy sweet treat. 



 Cook the Bacon:  I have often just dried out the same pot, cut the slices with scissors into the pot and cooked them up, then removed and drained.  Technique is not crucial, but if you have an electric stove, you can leave the burner on, dry the pan real quick and get the bacon back on while you're dealing with the broccoli's ice stage.
  Mix the Dressing:  Place all ingredients into a bowl and mix thoroughly. Taste for sweet/sour balance and correct for your preference.  I like it sweet-tangy, your mileage may vary.
  WHY SOUR CREAM??  Most traditional recipes use mayonnaise or Miracle Whip, but when I was in a panic the last time, I subbed the sour cream and loved it, so my base-line is Clover Light Sour Cream.  Mayo and The Whip will have their day in court, I assure you!
Notes on variants:  Apple Cider Vinegar will give it a bit more fruitiness; Dried Fruits can be mixed and matched to great effect; and black pepper can be substituted just as well, but use less as it is more pungent and somewhat more acrid (that is a positive attribute in pepper, remember).  

SPECIAL NOTE:  Fresh Nutmeg is not a mystical device, you can find them in many markets, at Penzeys shops or at Penzeys.com.  They seem a bit pricey, but you get HUGE flavor from a few grates and in a ziploc or tupperware container they will literally last until the end of eternity.  You will get your money’s worth and all it takes is a microplane grater or a fine-grade rasp from the hardware store.  Nutmeg is bitchin’ on all dark greens:  kale, spinach, broccoli, chard, etc. as well as anything Indian and all baking applications.

MIX IT ALL UP!!!!  Just toss all the stuff into a large bowl and add the dressing, then gently turn over and over with a spoon to cover.  Voy-OLA!!! 



  SERVE: With a generous side of Pulled Pork from your crock pot with any of Guy Fieri’s kick-ass BBQ sauces (you'll probably find them in your supermarket, but this is a shopping link as well,) on a toasted brioche bun.  

Be Bold, Be Beautiful, and most of all Be Brave, in your kitchen and your life. In the words of Ben & Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen, there are very few irredeemable mistakes, so start experimenting and change your Fate! 


**Seriously, All photos property of Joy of Cooking Fairy or Disney-Pixar, You know what's-what and Who's Who, play fair and be good, Munchkins.

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Broccoli Brain-Join Me!

The other day I cleaned off my counter a bit.  I already have more counter space than any girl should have a right to expect in life, but I get...cluttered feeling.  Plus, I need inspiration.  So the cookbooks that had become wedged into a corner behind the letter box and the crockpot came out of hiding, some went upstairs to be wedged into the bookshelves  and some became the newly displayed on Grandma's book table:

BTW, a brief aside:  Allow me to introduce you to the Food Lover's Companion. 

 A brilliant piece of gastronomic quick-reference, it's a dictionary--an encyclopedia, nearly--of food terms and ingredients concisely defined and elucidated. All entries contain phonetic spelling, Foreign-language terms are translated and referenced back.   Your romantic dinner menu for a new flame calls for Ostrica?  

"Ostrica [oh-STREE-kah]  Italian for Oyster."

The entry for Oyster being on the next page and beginning with reference to Jonathan Swift's appraisal of the first consumer thereof.  The Companion is a treasure.  This is no book for the Higher Gastronome, this is a pocket book for the people, demystifying and delineating.  I use it at work constantly and The Companion saves my bacon every time.

Oh, really, Who am I kidding...It wasn't just a Spring Cleaning, I am Deferring. 


I am Disturbed.  Deeply Disturbed.  

Joy has failed me.

No, Really.  Broccoli Salad has brought The Book low.  

The Scene:  Last week I sat in my nail salon (Strawberry Nails in San Jose for those on home turf, treat yerownself if possible), where they air Food Network allllll day long.  The Entrèe basket on Chopped included Catfish, and I became obsessed with frying dinner that night.  So I cruised through Lunardi's on my way home, grabbing some Cod (check Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch App for great recommendations on sustainable fish available in your area) and corn meal.  I remembered I had broccoli so I popped some raisins into the baskets too.  Southern peeps, you see my fever here.

Let me state here for all eternity the Most Sacred and Holy Writ of Broccoli Salad:  It shall contain, No More, and No Less than blanched Broccoli, Raisins, Bacon, Red Onion and Dressing. 


 I thought.

I get home, bouncing around the kitchen, setting up my fry station, fish station, heating the oven for the biscuits, then starting on the Broccoli Salad so it would have the requisite bedding-down time in the fridge.  I know, like I know the feeling of hand-knit socks on my feet, egg-zackly what this is supposed to be.  Each part, and the whole. 


I thought.


But I'm sketchy on the dressing.  So I swing over to the book rack and flip through the Joy (2006, 75th anniversary edition), straight to Broccoli. 

-Cheese Casserole

-deep-fried

-freezing

and five more of the like.  No salad. Check Salad; No Broccoli. Pardon, WHAT?  Vegetable salads, yes--Tomato, Cucumber and Waldorf. Period.  


Back to the 1975 edition-- Broccoli's Record in the age of Disco? Three, count 'em three entries: "Creamed, quick; deep-fried; timbale".  Salad includes "Cheese Ring"(bleurrrghhhh), but no cruciferous members.


Foxtrot back to the 1953 blue Joy.  Hooray!  Broccoli swingin' in the Salads!  "Cooked Broccoli; Raw Broccoli Stem Salad"!  Which basically consist of broccoli, in French dressing (the popularity of which between 1935 and 1965 is astounding in itself), served on a lettuce leaf.

WHATDAHECKPEOPLE!!!!!

So my lovely little blog post on yummy Southern Dinner night turned into OCD Days, heavy on the Obsession Sauce:

I went through Julia, Bon Appetit, America's Test Kitchen, two editions of Fannie Farmer and Better Homes and Gardens.  Then I went deep, to the cookbooks inherited from grandparents who would have long-hurdled 100 by now, to the odd-ball stuff like The Prudence Penny, the California Regional Cookbook, The Household Searchlight, TheWaldorf Astoria Hotel Cookbook, The White House Cookbook; pamphlets and hand-written notes on backs of envelopes; digging into a mayonnaise-and-canned-tuna-aspic laden first half of the twentieth century which should, for the most part, remain hidden.

Three winners emerged:  The Betty Crocker Cookbook, 10th ed. 2006 ( one entry- "Broccoli Sunshine Salad", pg 384);  the California Cookbook, Third Edition 1949 ("Raw Broccoli Salad", pg 8);  and the Grand Prize winner, with FOUR recipes, the Sisters In the Kitchen Cookbook, 2007 (pp 67-68),  from my sister's church in Kansas.

Now, to give you some small background on my madness (oh reaaaalllly,you say?),  at some point you will find I have had to return to university to obtain a degree in Food History solely to publish a Thesis on Potato Salad as Social and Historical Adhesive and Accelerant.  Meaning, I've been chewing over this idea for years that the complexity of the world of Potato Salad holds vast insight into the inner workings of social order, family structure, group migration and personal identity.  The variants of Potato Salad are infinite and someday I will invite you into this world.  


What I did NOT expect the other night, when I innocently set about my down-home dinner fixin' was to discover:  A) Broccoli Salad seems to be a quite recent invention;  B) It's permutations and social divisions appear to be in some sort of proto-Potato Salad state with regard to ingredients and dressings--Mayo vs. Miracle Whip, anyone??


What a mess. And it's fascinating.


I've been sitting here for days under piles of books, researching the internet for recipe variants and it's like watching a colony of Sea Monkeys suddenly start to ACTUALLY evolve.

And so far, no fun cook-along recipe and lovely photos for you from the other day. I tried a couple of dressings off the internet--one which shall remain un-referenced as it called for a HUGE amount of mayonnaise, a bit of balsamic and a small amount of sugar.  It tasted like the inside of a rancid Mayo bottle. So I found a couple more and improvised.  By the time I got the dressing together I was in a dead run to finish cooking dinner:

Sorry for the quality of the photo, but I only realized at the last minute I had no snaps to prove any of this happened.  The fish was not, in fact, plated by a Wolverine, I had only just forked it's crunchity flakiness when I grabbed my iPhone.

So, a delicious result, but a great deal of work ahead.  Hopefully by the end you'll love broccoli and begin to feel the wonder of how Cooking is a Living Art.  If you have a recipe for Broccoli or Broccoli-Cauliflower salad, please feel free to share, with full attribution for your genius, and maybe some info on who you got the recipe from, where you're from, how long you've been making it, etc.  Like I said, this is what makes Cooking Alive. Join Me? 

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