George H. W. Bush ("I'm President of the United States and if I don't want to eat broccoli, I don't have to!") notwithstanding, most folks love broccoli. It's taste, texture, and nutrition are good enough reasons, but there's also this reason: It battles its way through the winter freezes unscathed.
I cut this head this morning—and just in time. It was right on the verge of flowering (due to the recent warmup in temps) as you can see from the myriad swollen buds. This head made it through many nights in the low twenties a couple weeks ago, unprotected most of the time. A few nights I covered the cabbage and broccoli with plastic buckets or garbage bags, but stopped when I figured the temps had dropped too low. What troopers! Who could ask for a more lovely head of broccoli, or know what extremes it withstood so I could go out this morning and cut it.
When my crisper in the refrigerator is too full for something like this head of broccoli, I'll put it in a large zip-lock bag, seal the zip all the way across except for an inch, pooch out the inch-long space so it's open and I can get my mouth around it, and suck the air out of the bag, sealing it tight. Oxygen is the great oxidizer of foods, so keeping perishable items in bags with the oxygen sucked out keeps them crisper longer in the "open" part of the refrigerator:
If you never grow broccoli you never avail yourself of the residual treats the plant provides: After a head is cut, the plant will send up small heads at the leaf nodes which can be picked and thrown into a salad or stir-fry—or snapped off and eaten like candy right on the spot as my granddaughters do in their garden. Because the head I cut this morning was overdue for cutting, the side shoots had already formed:
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