A few months ago, and honestly not for the first or realistically the last time, my family betrayed me. It started, almost predictably, with the youngest. I made waffles one morning, so proud of myself for remembering to start the yeasted waffle batter, my favorite, the night before — and my daughter told me that she prefers the waffles at grandma’s house. “What kind does grandma make?” I asked. “They’re in the freezer,” she told me. “I think they say ‘egg’ on them?”

I think we all know where this was going. I was traveling a wee bit over the last few months and decided before a trip to surprise her with a giant box of Eggos in the freezer. When I got home at the end of the week, the whole box was gone. It turns out that it isn’t just my daughter who prefers them, it’s my son too, and even my husband. The treachery!

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I’ve been working up the courage to tell you about this dish for a few years. Why courage, you might ask? What’s courageous about the timeless combination of broccoli and pasta, Deb? It’s the cooking time. This broccoli is not al dente. It does not “retain a crunch,” “still have some bite to it,” or keep any of the verdant green hue it entered the pan with. And, even more audacious, it doesn’t wish to. This broccoli applies a philosophy of vegetable cooking times fairly polarized from our current moment, when the minutes we walk vegetables by the fire have plunged so far that some of us even advocate for eating cauliflower, asparagus, and even broccoli raw. [Or, in a twist on the words of a steak cooking chart I once saw on the wall of a restaurant in Texas: A good farmer could still save the vegetable.]

But there is a time and place for all vegetable cookery, and this is the one that really made me fall in love with what happens when broccoli is cooked until it begins to melt. What is key is that this is not the bland, soggy, boiled to death broccoli nightmare of someone’s childhood cafeteria or dinner at grandma’s house. [Justice for grandmothers, always, however, for feeding us ingrates anyway.] This is more silky, closer to braised, and has an elusive vegetable sweetness, a nod of vegetable confit, that only comes with the luxury of the unrushed.

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