For the first time in decades of wrangling whole turkey dinners, I actually made a green vegetable people actually ate. Hint: It wasn’t Brussels sprouts, which can never be tricked up enough. And it wasn’t fresh green beans, which were heaped high in the Greenmarket but failed a test run the Sunday before we started roasting our big bird. One of our favorite farmers had excellent broccoli as well as Romanesco cauliflower, so I teamed those with roasted and marinated red peppers I’d made earlier plus chopped spiced Moroccan oil-cured olives and crumbled Rogue Creamery’s Smokey Blue, all with a lemon-shallot-olive oil dressing.
A survivor we ran into at the market today asked if it was something I’d just concocted, so I gave her the ingredient list but not the tricks: I blanched the broccoli and cauliflower in big chunks in boiling, salted water, then cooled them in an ice-water bath, then drained and dried them well and separated the florets into bite-size bits. (Cooking large keeps ’em from overcooking.) I went higher on the lemon juice in the dressing than I would with vinegar (almost half and half rather than one to three) both because I figured the acidity would tenderize the vegetables and because the peppers had been steeping in olive oil. A minced shallot was also essential. And to make the peppers I roasted them under the broiler until they were blackened on all sides, slipped off the skins and scraped out the seeds, cut the flesh into strips and tossed them with a large crushed garlic clove and lots of really good olive oil. Salt and smoky black pepper were also involved.
As for proportions in the whole dish, I did not stint on the olives and peppers for the small heads of broccoli and cauliflower. Or on the blue cheese.
FITTOC 