Yummy Malaysiana: pasta with garlicky broccoli rabe

pasta with garlicky broccoli rabe

In my humble opinion, theres cooking and theres cooking. (I know, Ill just give you a minute for the staggering profundity of that sentence to kick in.) What I mean is, its one thing to turn banana bread into a crepe, that crepe into a cake, that cake into a vehicle for walnut butterscotch, drooling, diet-postponing, and seconds, and its an entirely other thing to find yourself at the playground at 5:15 p.m. and realize a) you dont actually have anything in the fridge that you can turn into dinner, b) you, in fact, barely feel like cooking, in fact, your interest in cooking is only a single degree stronger than your desire to order in, so this better be easy, and c) the adjacent farmers market which you have heard from others boasts ramps and asparagus and spinach and other new! spring! delights! in fact, at the tail end of the day, boasts few things aside from a straggler of a single bundle of broccoli rabe. And you like broccoli rabe, youve warmed to it quite a bit since youve accepted it into your life, but you hardly excel in turning it into a lightening-quick, lazy, and completely satisfying dinner (or LQLACSD for short).

Or, I didnt before last Wednesday afternoon. This thing where you can grab anything at random without a shopping list in hand or recipe in mind and transform it effortlessly into a LQLACSD, this is real cooking. This is what separates those grandmothers that cranked out dinner like clockwork every night for 60 years, that didnt throw in the towel because they only had canned peas and stale rice in the pantry, from the dilettantes. And people? Over 750 recipes into this site, Im still getting there. Sometimes, a simple recipe, one that you make once and instantly memorize and throw into the dinner rotation, helps.