Eating Dirt

A Little Motherly Love: Lamb, Carrots and Fava Salad

This year I made my desires for Mother's Day known well in advance: no gifts, just a day at home in the garden and a big dinner, cooked as a family.  It was delicious, and I got gifts anyway - three of Andy Goldsworthy's books, much loved by my kids after we watched his Rivers and Tides together a week or two back.

I spent the day puttering out in the yard, planting this, pulling that, occasionally enlisting the help of our kids and more occasionally having a glass of wine. Rose, of course, since the sun was shining. I collected favas, spring onions, mint, arugula and snap peas for the salad, which was the only part I had to make myself. Fresh favas are the best thing in the world, picked from the garden and eaten hours later. The flavor difference between them and the ones from the store, or even from the CSA box, is surprising. Perfect to go with some spring lamb.

These recipes are from David Tanis' A Platter of Figs, the first spring menu in the book. Its not something I would make every day, but a little fancy, with two kinds of meat (lamb wrapped in bacon) a salad, vegetable and a cake for dessert. All good springy things to enjoy with your Mom!

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Roasted Lamb and Saffron Carrots (adapted from David Tanis' A Platter of Figs):

(serves 4-6)

for the lamb:

 

1 boneless shoulder roast of veal, 2 to 3 pounds

salt and pepper

3 garlic cloves, sliced

olive oil

a few rosemary sprigs

a few thyme sprigs

3 ounces thinly sliced pancetta (or bacon)

1 T butter

2 spring onions, finely chopped

water or dry white wine

For the carrots:

1 lb carrots

1 T butter

2 cloves garlic

1/2 t grated lemon zest

Season the roast well with salt and pepper. Insert the garlic slices into the lose flesh on the underside of the roast. Drizzle a little olive oil over the meat. Lay the rosemary and thyme sprigs on the meat, then wrap the pancetta slices around the roast, tie it all together with kitchen string and place in a roasting pan. Refrigerate for a couple of hours or over night.

Bring the meat to room temperature and preheat the oven to 400°F. Roast the lamb for 45 minutes to an hour, until the internal temperature is 130°F. Let the meat rest on a platter, loosely covered, for at least 15 minutes before carving.

While the meat is cooking make the carrots and prepare the salad (recipe below). Peel the carrots and slice into thin coins. Sauté them in 1 T butter with a little crumbled saffron and a couple minced garlic cloves. Season well with salt and pepper and a half teaspoon of freshly grated lemon zest. Add 1/2 cup of water and simmer, covered for 5 minutes, or until the carrots are tender.

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Fava Bean Salad with Mountain Ham and Mint (adapted from David Tanis' A Platter of Figs):

2-3 pounds fresh young favas (sub in peas or snap peas if you don't have enough)

 

1 large fennel bulb

2 spring onions, thinly slivered

 salt and pepper

fruity olive oil

1/2 lemon

1/2 bunch mint

4 slices cured ham, such as jamon, serrano or prosciutto

arugula leaves

Shuck the favas, then blanch the beans in boiling water for 10 seconds, cool them in a large bowl of ice water. Pinch the skin and pop the bean out. This is a good task to share with kids.

Trim the top, stems and core from the fennel, and when you are ready to make the salad slice it into thin shreds or use a mandolin. Put them in a bowl with the favas (and peas), onions and some salt. Drizzle generously with olive oil to coat. Coarsely chop the mint leaves and add them, and squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the salad. Toss well, taste and correct if it needs more salt, oil or lemon.

 Pile the salad onto a large platter, surround with the ham or tear it into strips and scatter over the salad. Grind some pepper on top, garnish with some arugula and serve immediately.

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Quick Orecchiette with Green Things

 

Orecchiette is fast becoming my first stop lazy dinner, one step short of pesto with Trader Joe's dried tortellini, which is the one my kids will always eat under any circumstance. Pesto pasta is what we leave for the babysitter to cook, the one I am teaching my daughter to prepare for her little brother, or perhaps vice versa, as soon as he or she is old enough to operate the stove without needing to call the fire department. I recently taught my four year old how to turn the stove off - so she can quiet the tea kettle while I am indisposed - and consider that a major step toward dinner independence.

But until that time when I can have my children make dinner while I tend the garden, swap the laundry, read the paper or sit on the pot, I need something else to cook. Because I cannot possibly eat pesto pasta four times a week. I cannot even eat it twice a week. Not even when accompanied by salad. After seeing it day after day for five years, I cannot eat it at all. Don't get me wrong - I still adore pesto with other types of pasta - just not tortellini. Or those mini ravioli, tri-color or otherwise.

So now, thanks to the genius of Nigel Slater, I am training my children to eat orecchiette. My Italianate friend Jill will be the first to point out how clever it is to have one's children eat something called "little ears" in another language, and I am more than willing to take credit for simultaneously expanding their palates while teaching them to speak in a foreign tongue. And eating little ears?  That is nearly as exciting as snacking on boogers. So really, I win in three ways.

Except that they haven't quite taken a liking to this meal yet, but I can feel it coming. As long as I let them sit on my lap while I spoon it into their mouths, piece by piece, allowing at least three minutes in between each bite for chewing, eye rolling, gagging and, finally, swallowing, they choke it down. 

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Quick Orecchiette with Green Things (adapted from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries):

fava beans in their pods (a bag or so)

spinach leaves (about half a bunch or 4 cups, removed from the stems )

orecchiette for four (about four cups dry or half a pound or 8 oz)

2 cloves young garlic

1 Tablespoon olive oil

four to six sprigs of mint (or a small bunch)

8 oz or so ricotta cheese 

Start by putting a large pot of salted water on to boil. 

Next, remove the fava beans from their pods and queue them up to go into the pot as soon as the water boils - cook them for five to seven minutes, then remove them with a slotted spoon to a bowl full of cold water, leaving the boiling water in the pot.

In a smaller pan, heat the olive oil while you mince or thinly slice the garlic. Don't let the oil get too hot, and when the garlic is ready, put it in the pan to cook gently, not letting it brown. When it starts to color just a tiny bit, remove the pan from the heat and let it wait.

Now wash the spinach. Spinach tends to be sandy or muddy, so it (like lettuce) requires at least two washings. I like to fill my salad spinner with water, drop in the mesh basket and swish the greens in that, then pull out the basket, dump the water, replace the basket (with the greens inside) and fill and swish again. When it is clean (the rinse water won't be muddy anymore) pour it into a really big colander and let it wait in your sink. 

After the favas are out of the pot, dump in the pasta and cook it until it is soft but still chewy. It's package should give you some better guidelines for time. When the pasta is done, pour the water and pasta from the pot into the colander in the sink, where the clean spinach is waiting. Give it a good shake or two to remove excess water, then dump it all back into the pot and add the cheese. If you, like me, find that you have waited too long to use your ricotta (it will not smell right and will taste bitter), then throw the ricotta away and substitute with whatever cheese you have hanging around. Soft cheese is best, but cut off the rind because it won't melt nicely. If you need to use hard cheese, grate it over the pot. Pour in the garlic and oil and stir it all up.

Rinse the mint, roll it in a clean kitchen towel and pat it dry, then pull the leaves off the stems and chop them finely. Toss it into the pot after the pasta, greens, garlic and cheese have been added.

Now for the favas - squeeze them from their skins into a bowl, then add them to the pasta pot along with some salt (start with a half teaspoon or so) and stir it all up, tasting to see if it needs more. Add some pepper too.

Once the salt and pepper are right, serve. 

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Scorcher!

Today was HOT. I love hot here because we don't get much of it. At 7:00 this morning, when I ventured out to fetch some forgotten item out of the car, it was already seventy degrees.  Seventy!  Its a rare day when the temperature passes seventy even in the afternoon around here. So of course, the dinner menu needed a little work. I'm not about to eat comfort food soup when the temperature is close to ninety at dinnertime. 

I was lucky enough to visit my friend Steph at her home in Oakland this morning, where she fed me a tasty potato salad with mint and peas - very refreshing on a sweaty day. She then gave me the recipe, which had been given to her by our mutual friend Meagan in Brooklyn, who years ago gave me a delicious fajita marinade I will post sometime this summer. We grilled some up a few weeks back while all the grandparents were in town with great success. Today, since we happened to have new potatoes (both from our garden and the CSA box), peas and mint in the garden I had the salad again for dinner. We also have favas, so many favas, so I added some of those as well. I figure anything you can do with peas you can do with favas too. 

The potato salad was great, alongside some grilled swordfish with watermelon for dessert. I know...swordfish! Its full of mercury!  And thus is something I shouldn't feed the kids. But they love it, and so do I, so we eat it a few times a year. I've tried calling other meaty fleshed fish swordfish, but my kids always know better. They do eat most fish, though, which is just great. I wouldn't voluntarily eat fish until I went away to college, so their love of it just blows me away. But then I didn't have a problem eating cooked green vegetables like they do, so I guess thats the trade off.

After hearing last week's NPR story on high levels of lead found in kids' juices, I feel a little of the hook for choosing poisonous dinner foods for my children. It seems I just can't escape toxins in foods, and the best way to avoid sick kids is to eat a very varied diet. Lots of different things, with the intent of avoiding a buildup of whatever nasty stuff is found in any one particular food item. So there, swordfish naysayers.

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Potato Salad with Mint, Peas and Favas (adapted from Epicurious.com):

2 lb small new potatoes (red, white, fingerlings, whatever)

2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon minced shallot

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 cup podded (that means removed from the pod) peas (you can sub in frozen if you like)

1 cup podded fava beans 

2 Tablespoons chopped fresh mint

For starters, put  some generously salted water on the stove. While it is coming to a boil, scrub the potatoes, then cut them into one inch chunks (roughly).  When the water boils, toss in the potatoes and let them boil gently for ten minutes or so, testing them occasionally by poking one with a sharp knife. When the knife easily pierces the potato, they are done. Drain them into a colander in the sink and let them cool. Then, put about two inches of water back into your pot and heat it to a boil again. When it is boiling, throw in the peas and favas and let them boil vigorously for four minutes. Drain them into another colander in the sink. If you are using just frozen peas you can omit this step and add them to the potatoes, thawed. 

While the peas and potatoes cool, mix together the shallots, vinegar, oil, salt and pepper.  When the favas are cool, you'll need to remove their skin. Many of them will have already split their skin, so you can just squeeze them out. If not, then pinch a little hole in the skin and squeeze the beans out that way.

Mix together everything except the mint and let it stand or put it in the fridge. Right before serving (you can serve it cold or room temperature) mix in the mint.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (not the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugala salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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More Fava Love

This morning the kids and I harvested breakfast and dinner from our garden. Not a full meal, but at least part of it. For starters, we had a handful of home grown strawberries - a few of the tiny white alpine ones, and half a dozen nice red ones, minus a few slug bites. It turns out that a strawberry takes at least a week or so as a red berry to become fully ripe. We didn't realize this right away, and I had doubts our garden could actually produce sweet berries. But now I know, it just takes a long time for them to be ready. The red berries need to be dark red and super shiny, swollen looking, almost. Just turning red isn't enough. The little white ones are harder to gage, but the best indicator seems to be that they get larger than I expected, soft, and dry out a little, so that they are lighter in weight than their less sweet neighbors.

The white alpine plant is super productive, I'd love to find a red one. Its probably too late to plant berries for this year, but I'm plotting a spot for next year to replace my son's digging area. He'll have to move his ancient, rusty dump truck somewhere else.

We also dug up potatoes - about five and a third pounds from a three foot by four foot section of one of the raised beds. I am really cheap at heart, and would like to at least feel that I'm getting a reasonable deal on the produce we grow, and in this case I do. I paid about three dollars for seed potatoes, planted half of them back in January in this location, and then ignored them until now. I think thats a good trade - they were essentially free, since I didn't give them any water or food. Now that our dry foggy summer has arrived, I'll have to become a slave to the hose for everything else. Or maybe debug our sprinkler system, though after the humungous water bill we still haven't paid off from last year, I'd rather stick with something I can control. Maybe I'll buy one of those old school rotating sprinklers that screws onto the hose for the lawn.

The favas from our garden really surprised me last week, and this morning the kids picked more. I know that fresher produce always tastes better, but I figured that the favas growing in our yard would taste about the same as the ones we get from our CSA box. But that was way wrong. Picked just before cooking, they are like a completely different food - bright green, soft and really delicious. Our CSA favas are fine, but now I know I should eat them right away, instead of letting them languish in the fridge for a week or more while I schedule time for podding, skinning and cooking. Its much better to just bump the schedule back half an hour and do it as soon as the beans are picked.

So the favas win my Cheapest Yardfood Award. They need really, absolutely, no care (as long as it still rains occasionally), appear to have no pests, and are a thousand times more tasty than what you can buy in the store, one hundred times more than when fresh from someone else's farm. What a great deal! 

After the potatoes were dug, my daughter requested that we eat them with roast chicken for dinner. So we did. Along with some favas. The recipe I used for favas is actually for asparagus, but I threw in a bit of both. This is the third time I've made it, and it is good this way, but I think it might be better with favas alone. When they are super fresh. My good friend Shelley gave me this cookbook, Fast Fresh and Green, for my birthday, and I'm really enjoying the author's blog posts as she gardens and cooks, just like me.

When preparing this dinner, have the favas removed from their pods (they don't have to be skinned yet, but it would be easier if they were) before you start cooking. Then begin with the chicken. Once it is in the oven put on a pot of boiling water if you need to skin the favas. Prep the potatoes and get them in the oven when you flip the chicken after the first 20 minutes, then use the next 20 to prep the veggies and the last 20 to cook them. My kids love to take favas out of their pods - yours might too.

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Roat Chicken (adapted from Alice Waters' In the Green Kitchen):

One three to four pound chicken

Salt

Sprigs of thyme or other herbs

Olive Oil

Preheat the oven to 400°. Wash the chicken with water, then pat it dry with paper towels. Salt it liberally inside and outside. Put the chicken in a lightly oiled roasting pan, breast side up. Put a few sprigs of herbs in the cavity, then tie the legs together. Tuck the wingtips under the back of the neck.

Roast the chicken for 20 minutes, then turn the chicken over and roast breast side down for 20 minutes, then turn it over again so that it is breast side up and roast for 20 more minutes. To test for doneness, pierce the leg joint with a knife and make sure the juices that run out are clear, not pink. When done, remove the chicken to a platter and let it rest for ten minutes before carving.

While the chicken rests, add a little stock or water to the pan and, using a wooden spoon or spatula,  scrape the brown bits off and stir them into the liquid. Then remove the fat (you can spoon it off, but I like to pour it into a fat separator). Pour the juices over the meat after carving, right before serving.

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Favas and Asparagus with Dijon Thyme Pan Sauce (adapted from Susie Middleton's Fast, Fresh and Green):

1/4 cup chicken stock (you can always sub in water if you don't have any - and its good to freeze it in small increments, next time you have extra)

2 Tablespoons dry white wine (like sauvignon blanc)

1 Tablespoon olive oil

1 Tablespoon unsalted butter

2 bunches medium asparagus or 2 cups peeled and skinned favas (you'd probably want two full plastic bags worth before podding, see below for fava prep instructions) or 1 of each

1 Tablespoon fresh thyme, with the leaves pulled off the stems (you can sub in dried if needed)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Combine the stock and water in a measuring cup.

In a large, straight sided saute pan, heat the olive oil and butter over medium high heat. When the butter has melted and is bubbling, add the asparagus and favas and salt, toss to coat. Arrange in one layer, and cook without tossing until the undersides are browned, about four minutes.

Give the veggies a good stir, with the intent of turning them to their other sides, and let them cook over medium heat for another two minutes. Carefully pour the measuring cup of liquid over the pot, it will sputter, so be careful. Simmer for a couple minutes, until the liquid is nearly gone, then stir in the thyme and mustard and turn off the heat. Serve the veggies while warm and pour the pan juices over them.

Fava Bean Tagine

 

I love the way that rolls off my tongue - fava bean tagine. I bet if I made it into a little song and dance, while I served dinner, my daughter would repeat it all day long - just to annoy me. But would she eat it? Well, yes, under duress. I spoon fed her all the fava beans (which she enjoys raw, but not cooked) and sweet potatoes, in exchange for a bowl of super sugar clifford crisps, or some other fake-healthy organic sugar cereal. The chicken and cous-cous she ate on her own. My son refused the vegetables outright, but that is nothing unusual.

The tagine wasn't mostly favas, they didn't even make up a large percentage of the meal, but I did use a whole bag from last week's CSA delivery. Not counting what's in the garden, I"m all out. 

In this tagine, I replaced the usual green peas that my friend Khadesia taught me were OK to throw in at the last minute. She wouldn't use chard, or spinach. No kale or stir-fry greens. Carrots, sure. Sweet potatoes, of course. Turnips, maybe. But something green?  Only peas. I guess I could serve it with a salad, but I prefer to think of a tagine as a one-pot meal, excepting the cous-cous.

In my garden, favas are the one thing (besides mildew) that will always grow.  When I planted my garden in mid-January, only the favas managed to get going before the weather warmed up. They are great for the soil (if you cut and compost them before they flower, some say) and are great to eat, unless you have inherited an enzyme defect from your parents. Even if you have, Wikipedia tells me that most people with the disorder don't react to fava beans. 

There is also quite a bit of protein packed into them - according to Nutrition Data's website, a one cup  serving has 187 calories, 1 gram of fat, 33 grams of carbohydrates, 9 grams of fiber and 13 grams of protein. Also lots of vitamin A, folate and choline (whatever that is). That is for boiled beans, so I'm sure the fat changes when they're cooked in olive oil, but they start out good.  When you compare that to the green peas, its about the same with less protein.  

So I guess those brits with their grey skies and mushy peas were on to something. I have to say that I'm pretty impressed that I can grow 13 grams of protein per cup in my backyard without doing much of anything. But now I see that a cup of roast chicken has 43 grams of protein. So maybe its not such a good deal after all. But I'm definitely more sure than I was yesterday that a meat serving doesn't need to be very large.

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Khadesia's Chicken Tagine:

1 chicken, cut into parts

4 small sweet potatoes or 2 large

1/2 cup peas (or snap peas or fava beans - shelled, boiled briefly and skinned)

1 or 2 slices preserved lemon

1/2 bunch cilantro

1 Tablespoon olive oil

2 largish pinches saffron threads

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon colorant (safran)

salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a tagine - be careful not to turn the heat up too high (I use a medium low setting) because you can crack the tagine .  The temperature is about right before you hear a lot of sizzling. Sprinkle a little salt on the chicken, then arrange it in a single layer in the tagine. Add the preserved lemon to the chicken - on top is fine. Sprinkle half the spices (1 pinch saffron, 1/2 t coriander, turmeric, paprika and colorant) on top of the chicken, salt and pepper it and add half the cilantro. Put the lid on the tagine and cook over  for about twenty minutes.

While the chicken is cooking, wash, peel and slice the sweet potatoes into long slices (I usually cut them in half, then half the halves longways).  Wash the peas. If you're using favas, snap them out of the pods, then drop the beans into boiling water for about thirty seconds. Drain them and pour them into a bowl of ice water, then skin them. Its easiest to pinch the pale green skin on the stem end, then gently squeeze the bean to get it out.  When twenty minutes have passed, flip the chicken over, then sprinkle the remainder of the spices and cilantro on top. Lay the sweet potatoes on top of the chicken.  Cover and cook for another twenty to thirty minutes.  For the last few minutes, add the peas or favas.

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cous-cous:

1 cup cous-cous

2 cups boiling water

1 tablespoon olive oil

salt

Bring the water to a boil in a teakettle or separate pot and keep it simmering.  Heat the oil in a large skillet (or low sided pot), then add the cous-cous and stir it around for a couple minutes until it browns just a little bit. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon of salt and remove the skillet from heat.  Pour in the water, it will bubble up and make some noise.  Quickly stir it one time, then cover the skillet with a lid and let it sit for ten minutes. If it seems too dry, then add another cup of water in the same manner. Fluff the cous-cous before serving.

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A Spring Take On Pasta Primavera

 

No eggs for egg salad today, after yesterday's debacle.  

I love fava beans.  To me, they are the harbinger of spring.  Yes, they are a pain to prepare - first you shell the beans, then you boil them really briefly, then you skin the beans - but I find it a reasonable tradeoff. Favas start showing up at the market around the same time as shelling peas, asparagus and lilacs. Lilacs are my absolute favorite, except for  Lily of the Valley, yet another springtime superstar of the garden. I would gladly trade a year's worth of chocolate to get both of those to flower every spring in my yard.

Pasta Primavera, on the other hand, I have mixed feelings for. It is one of those foods usually more fatty and salty than good, and can range anywhere from comforting to frightening, depending on who makes it for me. But this one is from Canal House Cooking again, and is both a joy to cook and to eat. Like the name implies, it actually uses young spring vegetables, not old crufters you might find at the grocery store in January.

Its ham and spaghetti appeal to kids and manly meat eaters, and the veggies aren't too hard to separate out, should someone deem them unfit for consumption. The only caveat to easy assembly are the favas and peas. I recruit my kids to help shell them. Its the one time I encourage them to shred food, so they don't mind helping out. Getting started on those early on in the day is a good idea, they can sit out on the counter just fine and will benefit from a few minutes of attention here and there.

Today was the perfect spring day - I made dinner with the kitchen doors open to the deck and wandered down to pick mint from the garden. Lots of sun, not too hot. Hopefully tomorrow I'll make it out there again to start some seedlings, but that is looking doubtful. I hope the weather holds until Thursday. 

My bad decisions of yesterday were replaced by plain old bad luck today.  We managed to make it to the Garden Railway at the Conservatory of Flowers, which was very cool - a miniature railroad featuring city landmarks all built of recycled trash - but the fog machine was broken, so the 11:15 fogging I had promised the kids didn't happen.  Instead, we identified and counted the kitchen gadgets used to build the Ferry Plaza building. Then this evening at dinner, I managed to break two corkscrews while attempting to open a bottle of riesling.  Luckily, I found my old swiss army knife while cleaning out my top dresser drawer this past weekend - and it did the job just fine. 

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Pasta Primavera (adapted from Canal House Cooking volume 3):

Extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup diced smoked ham (if you have kids who will like this part, double it)

1 cup fava beans, shelled, then dropped for 30 seconds into boiling water, then peeled. 

1 cup shelled peas

1 bunch chopped thin asparagus

1 stalk green garlic

1 pound spaghetti

1 Tablespoon tomato paste 

A few finely chopped fresh mint leaves

Grated pecorino romano cheese

For starters, you can prep the fava beans and peas in advance.  The peas just need to be shelled.  The favas need to be shelled (the easiest way is to break the end off the bean pod, squeeze out a bean, then break it again to get to the next bean, squeeze it out, and so on).  Then drop them for 30 seconds into a pot of boiling water.  Drain them and dump them into a bowl of ice water.  Then peel them (the easiest way is to pinch a bit of the skin off, then just squeeze the bean so it pops out of the pinched spot).

When its time to make dinner, bring a large pot of salted water to boil over medium heat.  The pasta takes about ten minutes to cook, so don't start it until fifteen or so minutes before you want to eat.  Instead, turn the heat down to simmer once it boils, so that your water is ready to heat up quickly when you are ready for it.  Put about two Tablespoons of olive oil in a large, low sided pot or pan over medium-low heat.  When it is hot (it will shimmer, but should not smoke) add the ham.  Stir it around for a couple minutes until it starts to brown just a little bit, then throw in the green garlic and peas.  Add about 1/2 cup of the boiling pasta water, stir it up, and let the peas simmer in it for five to ten minutes, until they seem done to you. Then add the favas and asparagus and cook it for about five minutes more.  Remove the pan from heat and don't put a lid on it.  

If you haven't already, put the pasta on to cook.  Turn the heat back up so that the water boils vigorously, then pour it in and mix it up right away, to prevent clumping.  When it is done, drain it and then put it back into the pot.  Add the tomato paste and about three more Tablespoons of olive oil and stir to coat.  Then add the vegetables and ham, along with any pan juices, to the spaghetti and stir it together.  Salt and pepper to taste. Serve into bowls, sprinkle with the fresh mint and grate some cheese over the top.

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