Key takeaways
• Ina Gartens 15 -minute broccoli and Bowties recipe delivers fresh lemon, butter and casual weekday charm.
• Blanche and broccoli together, toss with garlic -leemon -butt sauce, and then top with pine nuts.
• This light, elegant recipe comes from the early days of Ina Garten and wins over families.
When I feel like I’ve run out of ideas for dinner, it’s fun to revise classic cookbooks for inspiration. I spend a few minutes browsing my cooking bucking shelf in the hope of landing on something that not only sounds good to me, but that my children are also excited about.
For a recent dinner, Ina Garten came to save with her broccoli & Bow ribbon. It’s just as much a broccoli bowl as a pastar, so it makes sense that the vegetable gets top invoicing in the recipe. It requires eight cups of flowers, which for me were the yield from three large crowns of broccoli. Combined with half a pound of pasta, this gives a light head – or a starchy vegetable side.
Simply Recipes / Coco Morante
How to make Ina Gartens Broccoli & Bowties
When you do not count the time it takes for a large saucepan to boil, you will only spend about 15 minutes in the kitchen throwing this bowl together. It is a small pet pool of me when recipes do not count parts of the process as water boiling. I recommend spending that time to get your flowers prepped, zest and juice your lemon, chop garlic and bowl your pine nuts.
When the water boils, everything happens very quickly. First, give the flowers a quick chef in salted water before transferring them to a large bowl. Next, cook the pasta in the same water and at the same time throw a quick frying pan sauce with olive oil, butter, garlic and lemon. When the pasta is done with cooking, add it to the bowl with the blanched broccoli, pour the sauce, throw everything and sprinkle the pine nuts on top.
Easy, right? I like this style of cooking so much. There is a breeziness for the way you zipper through all the Prep steps, and the end result is very good, especially for quick weekday cooking. The fresh lemon and broccoli equalize the rich butter and pine trees, and the pasta acts as a base for everything.
Simply Recipes / Coco Morante
Why all my family loves ina garden broccoli & Bowties
This dish went well in my house, especially when my girls got to add their own “sprinkle of cheese” – aka torn parmesan – at the table. They already love pasta and broccoli, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume they would be happy with the meal. We ate it next to some chicken drums that I started in the air freezer at the same time, the pasta water went on the oven to cook.
Ina is just so big, isn’t she? These kinds of recipes remind me why she has been such a beloved fixture since the early 2000s when she first welcomed us into her Hampton Home Kitchen. This recipe goes back to the beginning days of her career. It’s shown in her cookbook from 2002 Barefoot Contessa family style and in an episode of 2003 of “Barefoot Contessa.”
On the show, she makes a party meal for some friends and their two young daughters as part of a child party theme episode. I love the idea of serving this as part of a sweet little birthday dinner at home.