Broccoli Rabe

I love the flavors of spicy garlicky sausage together with nutty greens such as broccoli rabe. Besides fusilli noodles, penne rigate, orecchiette, or any other large toothy pasta shape is good for this sauce.

The bright green stir-fry of Chinese restaurants. Other vegetables you can prepare this way: if you can’t find gai lan, use broccoli raab or even collards or kale; broccoli or cauliflower will work too.

This is a simple preparation that can serve as a side dish or main course (add some cooked sausage if you like) and can be made with any dark green, from spinach to collards to turnip or mustard greens. It needs no cheese.

Broccoli rabe grew wild in Italy, especially in southern Italy; in places like Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata, and Sicily it was abundant and free for the picking, and thus used especially to dress pasta dishes. Orecchiette, a pasta that has an indentation from being dragged with the finger on a board, was the pasta of choice. All of these regions are on the sea, and mussels were cheap and abundant as well. So it would seem natural that the three ingredients come together to make this wonderful dish. Now broccoli rabe is abundant in the United States, thanks to Andy Boy vegetable growers in California. This recipe is a delightful combination.

Broccoli rabe, the leafy bitter almond-flavored vegetable consumed by the Italians for centuries, has found its way into American hearts. It is great just braised with olive oil and garlic; it makes an excellent soup; it is also delicious stuffed and as a flavoring in some crunchy Italian bread. But I love it with pasta, and not with just any pasta—I love it with orecchiette (little earlobes). Rapini, as it is called in Italy, is a plant in the mustard family that grew wild, especially in southern Italy. In America, the largest producer is Andy Boy, a company founded by Stephen and Andrew D’Arrigo, emigrants from Sicily, who officially named the rapini “broccoli rabe.” They knew that the vegetable that was part of their family table in Italy would make it to the American table.

Sausage and broccoli rabe are a marriage destined to last. Often served with pasta, most commonly orecchiette, this recipe is for quick, easy, hearty sandwiches with some greens in them.

You may know rapini as broccoli rabe, that delightfully bitter green you see in the market next to its mild cousin, chard. Blanching the rapini first tames a bit of the bitterness, while the straightforward preparation allows the vegetable to still be its bold self. Serve with roasted or grilled meats, dishes with assertive flavors that will hold up to the greens.

In this dish, the garlic tops serve as a roasting rack for the chicken. The garlic bottoms are then flipped halfway through the cooking time, to soak up the juices. Serve with toasted slices of French bread, if desired.

One of my go-to sandwiches in Washington, D.C., is the chicken cutlet at Taylor Gourmet, where the owners hail from Philadelphia and the sandwiches are all homages to the way things are done in the City of Brotherly Love. Their sandwiches are studies in simplicity: not too many ingredients, but they’re high-quality ones, treated well. I love their combination of crunchy chicken, bitter and spicy broccoli rabe, and slightly melting provolone. But at home I like to jazz things up by adding a mayonnaise spiked with peppadews, those miniature red peppers from South Africa that are pickled to sweet-and-sour perfection. If you can’t find them, substitute your favorite bread-and-butter pickle

Don’t confuse ricotta salata cheese with ricotta cheese. Made from lightly salted sheep’s milk curd that’s pressed and dried, firm ricotta salata is a notable cheese that originated in Sicily. It has a pleasant salty flavor that’s a little milder than pecorino Romano. Broccoli rabe, sometimes called Italian broccoli, is slightly bitter and earthy and makes an excellent base for a salad. This salad can be made a few hours in advance of serving, and it’s easy to double or triple the recipe for a large group.

This is an amazing dish because it takes everyday ingredients and joins them in a delicious and unexpected collaboration. Both the squash and the broccoli rabe have their own strong personalities—one sweet and one bitter—and each brings something to the party that would be sorely missed if one of them didn’t show up. Combined with the nutty, earthy flavor of the whole wheat pasta, this is what I call a real team effort.

When people think pesto, they think basil. But I like to mix pesto up and use broccoli rabe—one of my very favorite vegetables. Broccoli rabe makes a delicious starting point for pesto. Add some sharp cheese and pistachios and you’ve got an amazing way to transform an old classic. I stick with a traditional combo—bitter rabe and sweet sausage over orecchiette (translated as “little ear”)—but I tweak it just enough to make it fresh and fabulous!

Mustard greens and broccoli raab (also called brocoletti di rape, rape, and rapini) are somewhat bitter, a good counterpoint to creamy, subtly flavored ricotta cheese.

In my family, this is a traditional side during the holidays, but that’s just my family—it’s really perfect any time of year. The trick is to blanch the broccoli rabe in boiling water for a minute or so to get rid of some of the bitterness and partially cook it.

This recipe is a prime example that you don’t need tomato sauce to make a great-tasting pasta dish. And here’s a bonus: It tastes great at room temperature, so it’s perfect for picnics and casual buffet lunches.

I first had oil-poached fish in Napa Valley and loved the way this cooking method kept the fish so moist; you can’t really dry it out. You could prepare halibut or just about any other mild white fish this way. Be sure to use a mix of olive and vegetable oils to poach the fish; if you use 100 percent olive oil it will become too bitter. This is another really good-looking dish, with lots of pretty colors.

It’s the combination of bitter broccoli rabe and hot sausage that makes this one of the greatest Italian-American dishes. My mother began making this when my Uncle Joe became a butcher and could provide an unlimited supply of his own handmade pork-and-fennel sausages. It’s still one of my favorites of Mama’s dishes. Here I use whole-wheat penne and low-fat turkey sausage—but the rest I left just like Mama’s.

Feel free to swap out the green vegetable for whatever looks good. My husband, John, loves salami and really all pork in general. The only thing he likes better is a meal like this one, which combines pork and crispy salami-topped side dishes!

This is one of our favorite meals. The hardest part is waiting for the chicken to finish resting before we dig in. We love the slightly bitter sweetness of broccoli rabe, although if you prefer you could substitute broccoli or cauliflower. And really, the best part of this preparation is the amount of crispy chicken skin; because the bird is roasted flat, all the skin renders and crisps, which makes for an all-around better chicken.