Rhi recently made an impulse buy of a recipe magazine at the grocery store–Weight Watchers 15 Minutes 5 Ingredients. We’ve found a few good things in there so far, even though they get to the 15 minute cook+prep time by relying heavily on prepackaged things. We tend to avoid buying too many prepackaged things since they are both more expensive and less healthy. That’s easy enough to fix by doing things like using leftover roasted chicken in other recipes and cutting up our own vegetables (seriously, is is that hard to trim the ends off of green beans that you need to spend $4 and probably throw in some added salt to avoid doing it?). It is a nice book though and I especially like having some new ideas for vegetable side dishes since putting toasted almonds on top of green beans is about as exotic as our vegetables usually get.
Tonight we tried this one:
Ingredients:
4 cups broccoli florets
1 teaspoon grated fresh orange rind
1 teaspoon chopped chipotle chile, canned (I used a little bit of the sauce as well to help it coat the broccoli)
1 tablespoon butter
Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 475.
2. Place broccoli on a single layer on a jelly roll pan coated with cooking spray and bake at 475 for 12 minutes. Do not stir.
3. While broccoli roasts, combine orange rind, chipotle pepper and butter in a medium bowl. Add hot broccoli and toss to coat.
Here are my overall thoughts on the recipe:
This was the first time I’ve actually cooked with chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, even though chipotle flavored things have been all the rage for a while now. I found them in a small can, but only used a tiny bit of it so the rest are in the freezer waiting for a pot of chili so they can add a nice smoky and hot, but not too hot, taste. Oh, and the recipe book calls it “adobe” sauce in one section, and then fixes the typo later–since I’m a little bit of both a foodie and a geek, that made me laugh.
These flavors were really nice together and I will definitely put this sauce on broccoli or other vegetables again. Roasting broccoli in the oven was a first for me but it gives no added advantage over my usual method of steaming it–it didn’t get any dark yummy crispy bits like brussel sprouts get at a high temperature–so unless the cooktop is full of pots or I already have the oven on, I’ll probably just steam it in the future. Putting a little bit of the sauce from the can of chile’s in the dish ended up being a great idea because just the chopped chile’s were a little chunky and I wanted the flavor spread all over and also didn’t really want to eat bits of pepper. One more insight–I realized while putting this together that the butter should probably be melted before tossing it with broccoli (in my experience you either end up with little pats of unmelted butter or broccoli that starts to fall apart from too much stirring to make the butter melt–such troubles!). I had already put the sauce and butter in a stainless steel bowl when I decided I wanted the butter melted, so instead of using another dish and melting it all in the microwave, I briefly put the bowl on top of a pot of water that was already boiling for green beans –and felt more than a little bit clever about that little impromptu double boiler trick.
