I have been on overdrive for the past week with little time for cooking so I’ve been surviving on one of my favorite fallback fast meals: pasta with broccoli rabe, fava beans, lemon, garlic and olive oil. I top that with freshly shredded pecorino cheese to get to the tastiest health heaven I know.
Happily Six Rivers Farm in Bowdoinham now grows broccoli rabe and brings it to the Brunswick farmers' market. The bunched greens are not really broccoli. They’re in the turnip family so they have a lovely bitter bite and all the goodness of Vitamins A and C as well as minerals and iron to boot. These are killer greens because they are supposed to be able to kill lots of bacteria and cancerous radicals in your body.
I learned to cook them from a professional chef by chopping them coarsely and blanching them in heavily salted (salty as the sea) water for 1 to 2 minutes. This leaches out a bit of the bitterness and intensifies their green. I drain them as well as I can in a colander, shaking and shaking. While they sit in the sink drying off, I heat fruity olive oil in a skillet with a large pinch of cracked black pepper. I dump in the broccoli rabe, standing back because any moisture on it will make the olive oil snap, crackle and spit. I toss in 2 to 3 cloves of minced garlic, stir and sauté for two to three minutes. That’s it. Sometimes I simply salt that and serve as a side dish, which people lap up, and sometimes I store it in the fridge to add to pasta as I have been this past week.
The other key ingredient, the protein punch in my pretty and pretty fast pasta supper, comes from canned fava beans, sold in supermarkets either as pigeon peas, congo beans or ful mudammas, a north African/Arabic staple. This is a very happy development. Fava beans have more protein and tastiness than all other beans, which is why even after the discovery of other beans (kidney, black) in the New World, they remain the core of the Mediterranean diet. And they come cooked in cans!
So…I boil up some really fine Italian pasta like penne, or those squiggles that look like toothpicks. And while that’s happening, I heat more fruity olive oil in a skillet, throw in two handfuls of my already cooked broccoli rabe, another clove of minced garlic, a handful of those canned beans and some cracked black pepper. When the mix is warm, I squirt in the juice of maybe half a lemon and set it to simmer as low as possible until the pasta’s cooked.
It’s important to take a large tbsp of the pasta water and put it in the skillet with the rabe and beans before you drain that pasta. This gives the final dish a creamy effect. Toss the drained pasta into the skillet, salt it to your taste, drizzle it with fruity olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and blend everything. Pour this onto your plate and top it with freshly shredded or grated pecorino (sheep) or parmesan (cow) cheese. (These are dry salty cheeses.)
What you have is a feast for your eyes and wealth for your health. Try it with a glass of red wine and a green salad with black olives. I’m foolish for this southern Italian peasant food and so happy farmers are now making broccoli rabe available to us. And here's a shout out also to Trader Joe for that fabulously fruity and cheap chic Sicilian olive oil that adds so much to this.
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