favas (the year of)

Again this fall I will plant favas.  Probably, as long as I garden, I will.  But there may never again be a take like this year.  They all tillered, most to three.  They bloomed like mad, none of them blackened off.  Mild winter?  Just a gift?

Shuck, boil, skin, eat.  Repeat.  Jeff can even do it one-handed, and did while we were gone, a few times.  Holly has been up to her elbows more than once.

One day we will have a fancy digital scale and I will weigh all our harvests and be able to brag in numbers.  Not.

Right now we have two pints of shelled bright green beans in the fridge, and two goodwill bags of pods.  We ate them last night in a warm salad with potatoes and snap peas and Tona's cilantro-macadamia nut pesto.  We ate them the day before that with green garlic, pecorino, and pasta.  Jeff ate them before that in eggs, and on salads, and I think by the spoon out of the fridge.

Gay says she had them with potato gnocchi, and it was right.  Maybe this week I will make gnocchi?

I bought some pancetta because how have we not had them with pork?!

I used to love them best with corn and tiny diced fresh red onion.  But not in this climate.  Corn and favas at the same time??

Which brings us to: is it possible to freeze them in their skins?  And then pop them into the boiling water and shell them?  Worth an experiment, right?  They might get mushy.  Mushy beans = worst.

Jeff thinks these must have some kind of fat in them, to make them so oily and satisfying.  Uh, wikipedia?  Nope, but lots of iron.  Isn't wikipedia just so full of information?!

God bless the humble fava bean, and its easy relationship with our climate.  I hear it is poor man's food, yet this spring we feel rich.

kitchen update

Mother's day flowers and paint job by Jeff.
Drawings by Anastasia, Zelda, and Linden covering hood wire boxes.
Light by late May.

time lapse

4.30

5.23

in other news

While I'm doing five posts all at once, I may as well mention the chard, the radishes, the rhubarb.  You, spring!  You and your pink vegetables.  I mean, seriously.  I die of pure aesthetic joy.  And then I get to eat it.

stinky pee

For a while there, my pee was really stinky!  Gloriously noxious.  I always feel extra vigorous during the peak of asparagus season, like I must be getting some extra special vitamins to make my pee so rank so many times a day.

More to the point, this was the first year we cut - and ate - our own asparagus.  Really fun.  And since only a few were ready at a time, you had to buy some every time you had a chance so there would be enough for everyone.  We ate them grilled, steamed, rolled in the cast iron til crinkled and black, dipped in the molten yolk of fried eggs, in risotto, in salad with blue cheese, wrapped in salami while lazing on a blanket at the park, even raw, snapped right out of the dirt.

That was a while ago.  Most of them are headed happily to fern state now, and I am plotting how to fill in the holes with more and more crowns (or seed?) and maybe how to do a living mulch with that lovely - and rampant - chartreuse sedum that is everywhere here.

It would have been better if I had mentioned the asparagus a while ago, when we were actually eating them.  It would have been better if I hadn't eaten nearly all of that chocolate cake myself.  But that's not how it went down.  So sue me.

pasta+salad=pasta salad

This is an old Gay Riley technique, newly named by Patrick.  It's pasta salad.  You make pasta in one of many good ways.  You grow arugula (preferably together with garden cress), cut small if possible, wash, dry, and mix.  Delicious with a strong red sauce, or a sort of putanesca like I did the other week (with the last bag of frozen slow cooked tomatoes and oil cured olives and capers), and of course (if like me you are also cleaning out the freezer) seamless with the rest of last fall's pesto and a few toasted pine nuts.  I am also looking forward to a version with caramelized spring onions and feta.  Don't be a fool, add extra oil and salt.

flowies

Tis the season.

This last was two weeks ago; the red tulips are long gone now, and the ribes blooms as well.  But the daffodils and rosemary are going strong.  And the apple blossoms.  Be still my heart.