Fresh Fava Beans
A note to those of you who were with the Live Earth Farm CSA last year: this is pretty similar info to that which I provided for the 2nd harvest week of 2000 (people new to the CSA in 2001 or who don't have computers won't experience the redundancy). But there are a few new bits of info that weren't in last year's Fava blurb, so do read on!
Fresh favas are a delightful treat! If you like edamame, youll like favas. Open and remove beans from pods (pods are not edible*). Drop them into boiling water for a mere minute, then remove with a slotted spoon. Slip the greyish skins from beans (pinch a hole in one edge of the skin and you can kind of squirt them out). My favorite step at this point is to simply salt them and eat them warm, like a snack, but they can also be tossed into pasta dishes, soups or salads, or sautéed with garlic and herbs and pureed.
Here is something interesting that I discovered by accident when preparing favas by boiling: if you leave the cooking water in the pot for a while after removing the beans, it will turn pink after about 10 - 15 minutes, then darken to purple as it cools! No kidding!! I sure as heck wish someone with a chemistry background would explain this one to me.
*I may stand corrected on
this point, as I received an email from a fellow CSA member whose mother-in-law
is Arabic, and she gave me her mother-in-law's recipe for a dish wherein the
fresh favas were cooked pods and all! So I guess they (the pods) are
edible, only she (our fellow CSA member) doesn't really like the dish herself,
so... I'll leave it up to you if you want to try a recipe with the pods. If
you are interested, email me and I'll send you her mom-in-law's recipe.