One of the vegetables we had at the Canadian Thanksgiving dinner was this sesame broccoli from Savory Sweet Life (the other one was my mom’s carrots and mushrooms sauteed with paprika, which she made and I had nothing to do with, other than guzzling it). Holy cats is it ever easy. I forgot the salt, but nobody complained. In fact, mom made a point of discussing how so many things these days have ridiculous amounts of salt in them – and that there’s MORE in the Canadian versions! Canadians – and I can say this because I am one – spend a lot of time being holier-than-thou with regard to Americans. Food and diet are no exceptions; we are deeply invested in acting all shocked at the huuuuge portions you get in American restaurants, and how there are so many deep-fried things, and how someone invented the Turducken, and blah-dee-blah. Americans are so fatty fat fat and unhealthy and we’re soooo different from that. Except that that is categorically not true. I mean, sure, in Vancouver, where you can get socially ostracized for not engaging in outdoor sports more often than you change your socks, but Vancouver does not have that much in common with the rest of the nation. And if you’re looking at the mainstream packaged foods, they are not only loaded down with salt like they are here, but they’re actually a higher percentage of your daily allowance of sodium than the same food here. Maybe it’s because food manufacturers are responding to preferences ingrained back in the day, when everyone was more or less a hardy settler in an inhospitable, wintry land, and everything was salted to death for preservative reasons, or maybe we just all hate our arteries, but there you have it. So the long and the short of it is, I forgot the salt and nobody cared.

Sesame Broccoli

Ingredients
Broccoli
Sesame oil
Sesame seeds

Method
Steam the broccoli.
Drizzle with sesame oil.
Sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Toss to disperse seeds and oil evenly.

And that’s it! Then you eat it!