Painless Broccoli

Natalino broccoli

From our garden last year

My Aunt Jean introduced me to an extremely painless, low fat, way to eat steamed broccoli - sprinkle with lemon juice. Thanks Aunt Jean! That's how I always serve it now, with a little scrunch of mixed pepper & pink salt, perfect.

She also introduced me to broccoli slaw, which I don't remember ever having before. I did get the recipe from her, but I believe it's sitting at Mom's right now, doing not much of anything. So I did a search to see what I could turn up, and got this dressing recipe.

I had purchased a couple of deep butcher-trays filled with cut broccoli this week while grocery shopping; each one was less than a dollar, and I'm pretty sure there was the equivalent of one large head in each. I suppose that they were trimmings, but they were all perfectly good and very fresh. So I steamed some up, others went into a frittata this afternoon with the leftover roasted root veggies (very tasty and filling); the rest got de-stemmed, blanched & vacuum sealed for the freezer in single-portion units.

I was going to toss the stems into the compost when Dave reminded me of the slaw. Oh, yeah!! So Dave shredded his way through all the following veggies, and I mixed up the dressing.

Broccoli Slaw

Grate the following using a coarse grater:

stems off of two heads of broccoli
2 gala apples
2-3 medium carrots
1 small zucchini

add

1 cup raisins
1 cup sunflower seeds

for dressing, combine:

1 tbsp malt, balsamic or apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp dark maple syrup
1/4 cup mayonnaise and plain yogurt (half and half)

Stir everything together and refrigerate overnight if you can (or serve right away) to let the flavours develop.