Lara Vapnyar - Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

For some reason, it always seems warmer in the trailer when you make borscht than when you simply boil water. And there is another advantage. We don’t have enough space at the table, so we eat balancing our hot bowls in our laps. And the laps get warm too.

Too bad my son won’t eat borscht; he won’t eat any cooked vegetable. But he will eat some vegetables raw, which brings me to the broccoli recipe.

6. BROCCOLI

I haven’t found a way to make cooked broccoli delicious, so we mostly eat it raw. Every Monday, we go to the farmers’ market in Scranton to buy some. The trip itself is an adventure: first up and down on hilly Route 307, then into the maze of Scranton’s streets, where run-down wooden buildings alternate with Gothic churches and Masonic temples. Once we make it to the market, the kids get a dollar each to stuff themselves with cider, doughnuts, and cookies (Scranton’s market is so cheap you can really gorge on a dollar), and I don’t feel guilty because I’m buying a lot of vegetables. The broccoli is wonderful there. The bunches are a bright, sunny shade of green, they are firm but tender, and they taste fresh but not too grassy. My son’s favorite part (and mine too) is the stalk. I just cut it off, removing the tough part on the very bottom, and peel the rest with a potato peeler. My daughter loves florets, but only with a dip, which we make like this:

1 cup low-fat plain yogurt

1 clove of garlic (finely chopped)

Chopped parley

Lemon juice

Salt to taste

Look, both kids are eating broccoli! How I love them!

— L.V.

Lara Vapnyar is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse and a book of short stories, There Are Jews in My House , which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was the winner of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2004 Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers. Vapnyar, whose work has appeared in Open City, The New York Times , and The New Yorker , emigrated from Russia in 1994. She lives on Staten Island with her husband and two children.