Broccoli in the Bin?

In the fight against food waste, it was with heartfelt sorrow that I found my recently purchased bunch of broccoli was lying yellowed on its side in the salad crisper. Only the previous week had I Googled ‘Can you eat yellowed broccoli?’ and did not really want to go there again.

Now on the shelf above my yellowed broccoli was a tall plastic container marked ‘asparagus’ and in the bottom, two sheets of carefully folded kitchen towel that are kept moist and my asparagus spears were happily sitting on top and patiently waiting as their numbers are depleted during my week of healthy breakfasts without sprouting or going limp.

Next to them is a long flat plastic container also lined with two layers of kitchen towel, their inhabitants, milky white mushrooms, nuzzling one another snuggly under their double kitchen towel blanket which keeps them all nice and dry with not a hint of mushiness for a similar number of breakfasts.

But it was their tall morning meal mates that caught my attention, as  I looked from yellowing broccoli to the happy asparagus, and from asparagus to broccoli, and from broccoli to asparagus again; a lightbulb came on, I knew the solution.

I did I’m afraid ditch the yellow stuff already confident it would be for the last time. I procured some new fresh green broccoli, but now with a new hopeful spring in my step. On arriving home, I stripped the silly cellophane wrapping, separated the two stems that had been bundled together, sliced about a centimetre off the bottom of their stems and reached up to the cupboard above the fridge where I knew I would find tall yogurt pots ready for up-cycling. I half filled these with water and stood the broccoli stems in them, parking them next to the asparagus on the shelf in the fridge.

I leisurely consumed the first stem and it was a full five days later when I reached into the fridge for the second pot… to discover to my surprise that it was stuck… it had grown upwards and was pressing against the top of the fridge! It had also grown outwards, and the yogurt pot was distended with its burgeoning girth!

My daughter proclaimed there was something poetic about the broccoli being able to continue growing even when cut off from its roots. I’m proclaiming one more battle won in the fight against food waste!