Wednesday 23 March 2011

Broccoli with chorizo and boiled eggs

This is another brilliant way to eat Purple Sprouting Broccoli, which is at its best in my garden right now. This is a recipe idea from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book "River Cottage Everyday".


Basically all you have to do is skin the chorizo (or any other nice type of sausage), cut it into bite-sized chunks and fry it until it is crisp (about 10 minutes); boil some eggs (they should be fully set, but not really hard-boiled - perhaps about 4 -5 minutes); steam some broccoli (about 3 minutes), and combine the whole lot, serving it with whatever you consider to be a suitable accompaniment - maybe some nice bread, some pasta or some rice. The only difficult aspect of all this is to co-ordinate the cooking of the three main ingredients so that they are ready at the same time. Sprouting broccoli cooks really quickly and it is easy to over-cook it. For some reason it also seems to go cold very rapidly once cooked, so I would recommend getting everything else cooked and ready to go first (don't forget that peeling the boiled eggs may take at least a couple of minutes), then cooking the broccoli at the last minute, and serving it immediately.

Here's a picture of the main ingredient, shortly after harvesting... This was about 400g.


Here's the finished dish (hurriedly photographed before being devoured...)


This recipe is very easy to do, and the taste combination works really well. I would think that it would also be fine with bacon instead of the chorizo - or even black pudding!

P.S. Thanks to those of you offered their advice to me on the subject of photographing blue things. And just in case you were wondering, the vivid purple colour of the broccoli in my first picture above is NOT artificial!

10 comments:

  1. Ooh Yummy! Would definitely not substitute the chorizo with anything. Now I just need to wait and hope our broccoli seedlings produce.

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  2. Broccoli always works well with spicy sausages in my experience... The Italians do it quite well with a recipe for fusili with sausage and broccoli in a tomato sauce. (I tend to add a touch of chili if i can't find a good spicy sausage...)

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  3. That dish looks delicious! It is making my mouth water.

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  4. Looks delicious, great way to use broccoli.

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  5. Yummy! Just sowed some purple sprouting broccoli seeds will be another 3-4 months before we can have a taste. Are you freezing some?

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  6. Our PSB was destroed over-winter as were all the other winter greens except for the kale.

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  7. Looks delicious. If only those pesky pigeons hadn't eaten my broccoli.

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  8. That does look really good Mark, I love boiled egg with spicy foods, did you have curried egg sandwiches as a child? I think I may have grown up on them.

    The broccoli looks wonderful, and there's quite a lot too, hasn't it done well? I must invest in some fancy broccoli seeds - you've inspired me :)

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  9. Ali - No, I don't recall ever having had curried egg sandwiches. Which is surprising I suppose, with my upbringing... We had egg and cress sandwiches occasionally though.

    Diana: I have not had enough broccoli to freeze any. I only grow 6 plants each year, which is about right for our immediate needs over a 6-week period. Occasionally I give some way, because one of my sons-in-law is very keen on it, as is my best friend.

    GLA: No problems with pigeons attacking my broccoli this year (though they have sometimes done so in the past.) I have not even netted it. Maybe the "bribes" of bread and seeds that I put out for the birds are enough to divert their attention.

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  10. I wasn't the pigeons fault for us Mark - it was the snow and extreme cold that caused our damage. Only the curly kale survived.

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