CT FM 005: The Ultimate Guide To Broccoli

CT FM 005:

The Ultimate Guide To Broccoli Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our fifth Podcast from CT FM. For our 5th Podcast I wanted to talk about broccoli. I can’t remember when I first tried broccoli I have just always loved it and always wanted it in my diet.

As a child my parents used to shop at the cash and carry and they used to have broccoli and cheese soup that restaurants could buy to serve up as their soup of the day. It was broccoli and cheese and it was so delicious and I would always have a spare supply in the cupboard.

Then when I left home broccoli was about the best of the vegetables that we could afford. It was 70p for a single broccoli and that would be our vegetables for the week. Clearly we didn’t get our five a day back then, but I was 18 and healthy eating was the last thing on my mind! Plus if I had the choice with buying cheese or vegetables and the cheese would always win.

I remember Dominic once saying “not broccoli again” and I pointed out the value for money and how far it stretched and he then accepted it.

And has not moaned about it since. Especially, if I serve it up with roast chicken and potatoes – then he is a happy well fed husband!

Fast forward 16 years and we still buy broccoli every week. We will have 2-3 of them a week. Thankfully we do get our five a day now and it will be joined in the fridge with all our other favourite vegetables.

But what is so special about broccoli?

Well once you overlook that it comes from the same family as the cabbage you will be pleased to know that it is less than 35 calories per 100g provided you don’t cover it with butter!

It is also an excellent source of fibre, high in vitamin C and also contains vitamin A, Iron & calcium.

Cooking Tips So you have a lovely broccoli but then you wonder what on earth you are going to do with it. Unless you are a chef or have experience in cooking the chances are you will boil it in the pan and then serve it with some meat and potatoes.

Now this is an absolute NO, NO, When broccoli is boiled it loses its flavour and loses all the good vitamins that are stored in it. There is nothing worse than eating boiled vegetables.

You end up sat there eating them and forcing yourself to do so because you must eat your greens. But when cooked in other ways they taste so much better and it is no longer a chore to eat them.

The time I stopped eating boiled vegetables was the time when I really started to appreciate my vegetables. The flavour reminded of the one time when I paid over the odds for an organic vegetable box one Christmas and the taste was incredible. Boil it and you suddenly lose that flavour so remember that.

When it comes to cooking broccoli the best way to keep its colour and flavour is to steam it for just a few minutes. You will then have the best broccoli that you have ever tried. Plus it will not be mushy and over cooked like it is on many dinner plates.

Family Cooking Time I love to cook as a family. The idea that you’re all in the kitchen together making delicious family meals is just fantastic. But a lot of the time when

I think of family cooking it can often end up unhealthy and end up with a takeaway at home kind of theme.

In the old days we would have a homemade Chinese and it would often involve those really unhealthy sachets of cooking sauce that you should never eat.

So I have been looking around and thinking about what healthy cooking we could do as a family. Well with today having a broccoli theme let’s see what we can come up with!

First of all it is the turn of hellolittlehome.com and their deep pan broccoli, spinach and feta pizza. I love this because I remember as a child at primary school having friends around after school for pizza. My mum would buy the pizza base and then would have loads of ingredients spread out in the kitchen and all us eight year olds would decorate our own pizzas. It was great fun. But they were certainly not as healthy as this pizza which looks delicious.

Second for our favourite family recipes with broccoli is this broccoli mac & cheese salad from palatablepastime.com. I love mac and cheese and it is one of these great dishes that kids love to make with you, plus with having a twist on the traditional menu it will give your kids something new to make. This will certainly be coming down the beach with us this summer.

Third on the menu for fantastic family cooking is the healthy broccoli pasta from ChiliPepperMadness.com. If there is anything that I serve up for my son that he worships it has to be pasta.

Ever since he was a toddler, if you offered him some pasta he would eat it at rocket speed and then ask if there was any left. He is still the same today as a 14 year old. But I am also looking for pastas that a little bit healthier for him and I think I have found just the one ď Š Fourth on the list has to be our own deconstructed broccoli and cheese gratin on RecipeThis.com. We love this and the idea behind it is that you take your favourite broccoli gratin, so think of the ones you have at home as a comfort food or you eat as a pub meal and then take those ingredients and make them into a soup. It is delicious, full of flavour and if your kids will forget that it has green vegetables in it!

Fifth on the agenda for our favourite recipes for cooking with the kids has to be wholefoodbellies.com and their broccoli fritters. Many of you that read our blog will know that we are addicted to fritters but we have not made them with broccoli yet but after this we will be. I love the idea of making fritters with the kids. It is something

simple that they can get involved with, just like how they get excited when you make meatballs with them.

Family Healthy Eating Next on the agenda today is our family healthy eating section.

We will always joke about getting our kids to eat their greens. As a child we were told stories about how we would only be big and strong if we ate our vegetables or that we weren’t having our pudding until we had eaten all our vegetables.

I am sure you are listening and thinking that was me…………

But nowadays when I speak to fellow parents the conversation normally goes to the fact that the only vegetable they can get their kids to eat is garden peas and we all know they are not exactly great for them.

But I have never had that problem, maybe it is because he always had vegetables on his plate and the same with our daughter. Apart from his hatred for Brussel Sprouts at Christmas he loves them all. And while all his friends are off school with colds, stomach bugs and whatever other germs are going around, my kids are always fine. And I put this down to the fact of how healthy they are.

But for this section today I wanted to share with you four great recipes that are perfect for getting your kids eating healthy and they are all great for giving your kids a reason to eat broccoli.

First on the list is this lovely pasta dish from easycookingwithmolly.com it is one of those really easy to make pasta dishes that you could serve hot or cold. I could imagine us taking this down to the beach in the summer as an alternative to tuna pasta salad.

Though I will be leaving out the peanuts as they are not good with my nut allergy!

You know that idea that you don’t fix something unless it is broken? Well that has always been my opinion when it comes to salmon and broccoli. They go so perfectly together that I never want to eat them any other way. So when theseasonedmom.com introduced me to salmon and broccoli with a maple glaze I was there and in a rush to try it. It is certainly going to be a lunch time favourite for us all.

Next on the list is yummilyyours.com and they have certainly got my attention today. I love Indian food but there is always this big fat catch.

If I eat it regularly I will get fat. Though that is probably because I am obsessed with butter chicken, curries with double cream and deep fried starters, oh and don’t get me started with my obsession with the naan breads. So to find a dish that has its sauce made from plain yoghurt, comes with lots of broccoli and cauliflower then I am there and I want to eat it right now!

Next are these delicious broccoli tots from anitalianinmykitchen.com.

I could eat these all day long, plus your kids will love them too. They are perfect as a side dish or as part of a main meal.

Though with me living in Europe my first thought would

always be to serving them up as tapas with a garlic mayonnaise. But that is just me – how would you have them?

This brings us to this Podcasts Sponsor: For Podcast 5 of CT FM we wanted to bring to your attention the Russell Hobbs Food Steamer that we personally use and love. The secret to enjoying steamed food is having a really good steamer.

We will have salmon cooking on one layer, broccoli on another and then a third shelf for our new potatoes. We can then spend about 3 minutes putting it together and then wait for it to ding when it is ready. It is a super healthy, easy lunch.

Or we will use it if we are making mash and steam the potatoes in it before mashing them up.

We have never made steamed puddings with it, but we know many food bloggers that have!

You can find out all about the Russell Hobbs steamer at RecipeThis.com/foodsteamer/

Frugal Family Cooking When I think frugal family cooking I always think of broccoli. Like I said at the beginning of the Podcast we used to pay 70p for one back in 2000.

Yet now here in Portugal they are not that expensive for us. Just today we went grocery shopping and they were priced at just 1,19â‚Ź a kilo so on the US dollar that is like $0.60 a pound. So today we got a large, a medium and a small. It worked out at about 2 kilos worth and will last us a week and cover a lot of different meals.

There are some things that we buy that I feel are really not that frugal.

For example the delicious butternut squash. You never know how much vegetable you are getting for your money once you have peeled it; it is like roulette on the wallet. However I can take a large broccoli and think of all the different meals I can make out of it and that a kilo of broccoli will do several meals and often we will end the week with some leftover.

You can use it as your main vegetable on your plate when you have meat, potato and veg. You can also have it as part of a roast dinner, a soup, in a stir fry or even in the slow cooker.

I searched the world of food blogs and found five frugal recipes with broccoli that you may well want to try out.

Firstly we have the chicken and broccoli casserole from Wannabite.com and this looks delicious. With soy sauce and brown rice among the ingredients it will certainly be a frugal pleaser.

Second on the list we have a bacon broccoli salad from bakingbeauty.net. For most people this is very frugal and a great use out of your spare broccoli and bacon. Though for us it is sadly not. For us decent bacon costs a small fortune in Portugal so it is often reserved as a treat at Christmas, but having seen how good this recipe is I am off to buy some extra bacon. Call it an Easter present!

Third on the list for frugal cooking has to be chocolatemoosey.com and their broccoli mashed potato.

I love this because whenever I go away from the basic mashed potato it always stops being frugal. I love sweet potato mash and I love butternut squash mash, but when I make them they seem so expensive for what they

are. With this version you are making a luxury mash just without having to source luxury ingredients.

Fourth on the list has to be these soufflés. Made by fearlessdining.com it shows you that you can have a luxury item on the menu and that it doesn’t have to cost a fortune either. This would make a great starter for a dinner party and you could really wow people with this.

For our final frugal meal it has to go the chicken and broccoli pasta over at glutenfreefoodsmith.com. What I love about my chicken is that I can get four small chickens for just 2 euros each from our local cash and carry. Because Dominic and I are not big eaters we will chop the chicken from the carcass and then have the legs and wings one day and then the chicken breast another. This chicken pasta recipe is a great example of how you can stretch one chicken breast over a big meal to fill the whole family up and they will never feel like they are missing out.

Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our cooking tips with you in the future.

Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast  Russell Hobbs Food Steamer  Broccoli Chicken Casserole

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Bacon & Broccoli Salad Broccoli, Spinach & Feta Pizza Broccoli & Cheese Mashed Potatoes Broccoli Soufflés Broccoli Mac & Cheese Salad Healthy Broccoli Pasta Broccoli Apple Pasta Bowls Maple Glazed Salmon With Broccoli Deconstructed Broccoli Gratin Soup Broccoli & Feta Fritters Creamy Chicken & Broccoli Pasta Grilled Broccoli Kebabs Recipe Baked Broccoli Tots

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