Favas and asparagus make a delicious combination that tastes like spring. This recipe, p. 275, is a template for a lettuce-less salad that can highlight almost any vegetables from this season. The magic here is in the dressing: lemon, olive oil, capers and lots of herbs. Makes a great dinner with a roast chicken and Madison's Toasted Millet "Polenta".
This is a super simple salad to celebrate spring, with a perfect combination of flavors: sweet beets, fresh young favas, salty cheese and mint. It makes great use of beets, these beautifully colored red, golden or pink roots that are a CSA box staple frequently just too sweet to be much good in many other dishes.
That is what my mom would say, years ago, when I lived in New Jersey as a child. "Spring has sprung!" By then the last of winter's snow had melted away and crocus buds were beginning to unfurl in the lawn, as the grass came back to life. Purple, yellow, white, sometimes striped and always with a little orange bit in the middle. The bit that, I have since learned, is where the world's most expensive spice comes from: saffron.
The super-powered seeds Jack’s mother threw out her kitchen window must have been favas. While I can't help but question the wisdom of trading an entire cow for a handful of beans, there is real truth to this tale beyond the giants, golden eggs and beanstalks of unusual size: legumes are a delicious source of protein and can be remarkably easy to grow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love fava beans, they are delicious in the spring. Most years they are ready in our garden and appear at markets around the same time as shelling peas, asparagus and lilacs. Lilacs and lilies of the valley, superstars of the northeastern American garden, are my absolute favorites. I would gladly trade a year's worth of favas to have those two bloom for me in California.