1.5 lbs of broccoli cut into flowerets
2 tbs olive oil
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped
11 oz orecchiette
salt
Parmesan, freshly grated
I cut my little flowerlets until they were nice and small, and then cooked the broccoli in salted, boiling water for five minutes.
Then, I added the garlic and chile and cooked for three minutes. Smelled nice.
Since this was my first recipe attempt, and the instructions for orecchiette were a little vague- the basic recipe for orecchiette calls for 1.5 cups of all purpose flour, a generous 1/2 cup of semolina, and a "small" amount of water- I cheated on the orecchiette and picked some up from Wine Merchant on the way home, rather than make my own.
Gave it a sixteen-minute boil for al dente perfection. We only had a tiny pot for boiling, so the pasta was packed tight. Though this kind of thing is probably completely unacceptable in Italy, I did follow the Italian adage that the pasta water should be as "salty as the Mediterranean."
Pasta was drained and tossed, as was the broccoli, and the two were mixed with the garlic and chile. I threw in some red pepper flakes since the only chile I could find at Whole Foods was green and the dish needed a dash of color. In retrospect, I really wish I'd had a red chile, because it looked a little pasty 'round these parts.
Finally, a little crumbled Parmesean:
While it wasn't splendido, it was finito. I encountered a problem with the ratio of pasta to broccoli; I had way more pasta to broccoli than the deceptively beautiful Silver Spoon image, which I chalked up to the fact that I used 8.8 oz of dry pasta rather than 11 oz of fresh. And with the simplicity of this dish, freshly-made pasta would have been wonderful. I'm still excited to have completed a single recipe in the cookbook, and we enjoyed the spicy broccoli orecchiette with some Trader Joe's smoked herring and called it a day.
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