The nineteenth recipe I made for French Fridays with Dorie, from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook, was Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli, found on page 334.
I wasn't going to make this one, not because we don't like broccoli, but because we do. We love broccoli. Broccoli is a guest at our dinner table three nights a week, maybe more often than that actually. Broccoli is something I can count on to be a hands down, no fuss, no mess healthy item that everyone will be happy to eat and I know we are all getting great nutritional benefits from it. We might slide a teeny tiny bit of butter on it occasionally, but not always, we love it just plain steamed, still vibrantly green with just a touch of resistance when pierced with a knife.
Yes indeed...nothing I wanted to mess around with is what I was figuring. Why spoil a perfectly good thing with something they might like better that has more fuss, more mess, and definitely more calories? Butter and breadcrumbs with a bit of garlic thrown in there sounded too good to resist.
So I didn't. I made it. And it was so good! Absolutely dangerous stuff...dangerous to eat and easy enough that it would be dangerously easy to keep making it that way all the time. So, I did what any mother would do: I only made enough for myself to try it out and I am not telling the guys a thing about it...it will be our little secret.
It's that good...if I made this and served this to them, I would be making and serving this to them this way for the rest of my life, steamed broccoli would lose favor and my feel-good attitude about serving it 3-4 times a week would be a thing of the past. I will make this for holidays and swear on my life that it is a holiday-only dish. Shhhh...don't tell.
