What's good about rape?
Talk
about a vegetable with an undeserved bad rap. In Canada they
changed its name to canola. If you want a recipe you need to look
up broccoli raab or rapini. It's one of my standard, easy-to-grow
winter vegetables. A ten-by-ten foot patch provides a never ending
supply of fresh and healthy greens.
Yesterday in the dentist's
waiting room, a cooking show was on TV with the sound muted. I
watched the cook put greens on a cookie sheet and into the oven.
After the commercial when it came out the words "oven roasted rapini"
flashed on the screen. I was planning on sauteeing mixed greens
for a supper side dish, but decided to try this instead.
First I soaked the picked greens in cold water and drained them.
Then I cut them in two-or-three-inch-long sections.
A coating of olive oil with
salt preceded putting them on baking sheets and placing in a 350 degree
oven. A stir or two, then, fifteen minutes later--ready to eat
along with crock-pot navy beans cooked with chopped onions and green
pepper.
Delicious.
(Note from Anna: For those of you who aren't in the know, Errol is my
father, who homesteads in South Carolina and is the primary author of Low-Cost Sunroom. I'm tempted to nitpick about his use of the
term "rapini," which I understand to mean the broccoli-like flower buds
from various types of crucifers. But maybe he's right and I'm wrong and the whole plant can be called rapini? It definitely sounds better than rape....)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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