Stalk and all

Eating broccoli is a great idea – it can be boiled, steamed, stir-fried, roasted or eaten raw. What isn’t a great idea, though, is tossing out the broccoli stalk in the rubbish. Love Food, Hate Waste NZ has some helpful ideas for using up broccoli stalks. These include chopping up broccoli florets and stalks and blitzing them in a food processor, then adding eggs, flour, cheese and other ingredients to make fritters. If you don’t have a food processor, you can grate up the broccoli stalk to add, with the cooked florets, to onion, egg, flour, cheese and seasonings to make broccoli balls. Broccoli stalks can also be added to salads – simply peel the stalk, finely slice it into 5mm thick slices, blanch the slices in boiling water for a few minutes, refresh in cold water and then combine with the other ingredients. If you’re not overly fond of the texture of the broccoli stalk, you can always use a food processor to blitz up the cooked stalk to make a pasta sauce, or raw stalk to make a broccoli-based pesto. Broccoli stalks can also be cooked with the florets as the foundation for a nutrientpacked soup in cooler months.