Rapini

B. went to the market and brought home four veggies with no memory of what they were called and only a vague recollection of how to cook them. The first one I cooked was broccoli raab (since the florets sort of gave it away.)

I have a ridiculous number of cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I scoured them for recipe ideas. I wound up with a recipe from a cookbook I hadn't looked at much in a while, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Bittman's cookbook is a great resource. I bought it for B. when we were getting married, because he'd never done much cooking, and because I'd discovered that it was far more useful than Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker Cookbook. When it comes to cooking vegetables, the chapter is organized alphabetically by vegetable. It is not totally comprehensive, but it has plenty of things I've never heard of in it. Before giving you recipes for the veggie in question, the book tells you a little about the basics, recommended cooking techniques, and other vegetables you can substitute for (i.e., kohlrabi can be used in place of turnips in most recipes). Broccoli raab (a.k.a., rapini) is listed with broccoli, but there was a recipe specifically for it: Broccoli Raab with Sausage and Grapes. We had all the ingredients, and the result was delicious.

Instead of ordinary sausage we used lamb chorizo from Northridge Organic Farm. Mike, the owner, is at the Westerville Farmers' Market on Wednesday and the Worthington market on Saturday. He also sells veggies and beautiful, organic, wool yarn. (I've been drooling over the yarn for months, and I will buy it at some point.) I don't know where the rapini came from.