Broccoli Stalk Stew

Broccoli stalks, if you ask me, are the best part of the vegetable, and perhaps any vegetable. They can have a sort of pak choi flavour and texture if you don't cook them too much, and slice them thinly.

This is a take on a soup/stew I had a number of times when I was living in Cambodia. There, they use the stalks to good effect, slicing them to the thickness of a beer bottle top for want of a better, but all the same as appropriate, image - then cooking them in soups, fried rice, noodle dishes, and probably a lot of other dishes I've forgotten since those impecunious, halcyon days.

I've used potato here, which doesn't grow well in Cambodia, but the ingredients are far from consistent there, to be sure using whatever is cheap in the market that week, so I've tweaked accordingly.

It is usually served with a small bowl of chopped red chillies topped with a chunk of lime, maybe a side plate of a few leafy vegetables or herbs like they do so well in neighbouring Vietnam, and of course the ubiquitous, plastic (often red) basket containing fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, black pepper, toothpicks, and pickled green chillies if you're lucky. As dishes go it's got to be about as cheap as it comes, but it's very good all the same.

Stalks of two large broccoli heads, sliced thinly
2 large potatoes, each cut into eight pieces
1 small onion, chopped
1 tbsp vegetable oil
500ml water
Salt, pepper to taste
1 tsp chopped fresh ginger
1 tbsp chopped garlic
Chopped red bird eye chillies

Prep the vegetables then fry the onion in a pot until it has softened and is beginning to colour. Add the potato pieces, garlic, and ginger. Continuing frying for a few more minutes. Add the water, bring to the boil, cover the pot and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the broccoli stalks, recover the pot and cook for another five minutes or so until the stalks are tender and the potato still firm. Add a little more water if necessary. You don't want it swamping, but there needs to be liquor. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then serve with chillies, fish sauce and all the rest. Then imagine you're sitting on a plastic stool in 35C heat.

Waiter! There's A Snake In My Broccoli!

This has to be the cheffing story of the week – and it still makes me recoil in horror when I think about it. It’s not just my mortal phobia of snakes that’s to blame...it’s how the hell a chef could make such a howling schoolboy error when throwing broccoli on a plate!

Alright, I know the cooks are generally rushed off their feet at TGI Friday’s. And I know it’s not exactly Michelin star cooking, or indeed the standard expected by the SSSSSan Pellegrino world restaurant awards.

But come on! How can you confuse a broccoli floret with a severed serpent’s head?

The story started when Jack Pendleton spotted something grey, and well, distinctly reptile-shaped, mixed in with his veg while dining with his girlfriend at a TGI Friday's restaurant in Clifton Park, New York.

"I start to turn it over. I see this gray-green patch,” he said using that dramatic present tense so loved by football commentators.

“I could see these black, rotted eye sockets on the top. I stopped eating and I told my girlfriend, 'I think this is a head'."

The reptile’s head – about the size of a thumb - also had bits of spine and tendons still attached as if the horror wasn’t enough already.

A waiter was called over to remove the plate – but not before the 28-year-old art director had snapped a photo with his mobile phone.

"The manager came over white as a sheet," Pendleton told the Times Union. "He explained in five years he'd never run into anything like this."

The chain has since issued a statement, saying it took the incident "very seriously."

"We immediately pulled the broccoli from this restaurant and began an extensive investigation,” added spokeswoman Amy Freshwater.

“As a precautionary measure, we pulled broccoli from all restaurants that received product from this supplier. We have since isolated the specific lot date of the broccoli in question and have now reintroduced the product in all restaurants not included in the product hold.

"In addition, we are sending the object to an independent laboratory for testing. We... regret that this situation occurred in one of our restaurants."

The couple, of course, were not charged for their meals.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story is not that the American refuses to sue over his gruesome find...it’s that he plumped for a side-order of vegetables instead of fries with his chicken sandwich.