Baby Broccoli

I brought home some vegetables labeled baby broccoli from Trader Joe's this week. Now, I've grown broccoli before and it never goes through a stage where it looks like this so-called baby broccoli, so I figured the name was a marketing ploy. It looks a lot like Chinese broccoli (gai lan) and I've always preferred the taste of that to our garden variety stuff; I thought it might be the same thing. As it turns out, baby broccoli is a hybrid cross of broccoli and Chinese kale. It is also sold under the names asparation and broccolini.

I steamed it for twelve minutes and served it along side some mahi-mahi with a miso sauce over both. It's really tasty and the entire stalk is edible, unlike regular broccoli, the stalk of which has to be peeled in order to render it edible.