It’s time to put dinner on the table and we need a vegetable side dish.
A salad seems like so much work, and so does any other vegetable.
Frozen broccoli is a staple in our home, as I’m sure it is in many others, for just this reason. It doesn’t taste as good as fresh, of course, but it’s just so handy.
How can we prepare it to make it more acceptable?
- Microwave – this is how I ate it growing up. Bleh.
- Boiled or steamed. Soggy and blech.
- Stir-fried. Extra effort and more dirty dishes.
I might serve it to the kids, but I’m not excited about eating soggy, mushy broccoli. And I want to weight my dinner plate on the veggie side instead of making it starch-heavy.
What am I to do?
How can we prepare it to make it more acceptable?
Enter, my desperation move that paid off:
Roast the frozen broccoli!
- Open up the bag.
- Spread it on a cookie sheet (doing it on a baking mat makes it even more simple to clean up!)
- Sprinkle with cheese, salt, and a bit of garlic powder.
- Roast at 375-425 (anything in that range will work; I use whatever my other dinner dish requires and bake them at the same time) for 20-25 minutes.
Toasty. Cheesy. Not soggy.
Perfect.
We’ve eaten it without cheese. We’ve eaten it with Parmesan, with cheddar, with oil, without oil.
I’ve used frozen broccoli spears, frozen broccoli cuts, frozen broccoli florets – they all work. My favorite are broccoli spears, but the roasted frozen broccoli florets are probably the favorite of everyone else in the family.
Roasting frozen broccoli in the oven works so well because the extra moisture from the freezing evaporates instead of soaking in and making the broccoli a limp, soggy mess. It’s not as toothsome as roasted fresh broccoli, but it’s softer and so much better than steamed or microwaved frozen broccoli.
In the winter when fresh veggies are scarce, frozen broccoli makes a great choice – one that can be kept on hand without risk of spoiling and one that can be easily cooked alongside any other oven dinner dish, saving cooking time, energy, and resources.
Give it a try. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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