Fava Fiasco

I'd never cooked fava beans before, although I'd eaten them a couple of times and loved their taste of fresh-peas crossed with baby lima beans.  So when they appeared in the store again this spring, I figured we'd finally give them a try. 

I had to consult with a few cookbooks to figure out what to do with them, and that's when the confusion began.  These beans have giant, hairy pods, the beans inside have a shell, and then there's the part you actually eat.  I needed three cookbooks to discern that much, after weeding out the canned, dried and too-little-information recipes!

The prep-chefs got to work:

Here are the three stages of Fava:

(unpeeled, beans with shell and fully peeled (in the bowl).  Oddly, the chickens loved the silvery husks, but wouldn't touch the pods!)

I thought we'd try something simple, a fava-bean spread that consisted of beans, olive oil and garlic.  We'd really be able to taste the beans, and how hard could it be to make mush?

(please hold your laughter...)

We cooked a little garlic, we added the oil and beans and simmered.  Disclaimer: I have a habit of monkeying with recipes, but this time it wasn't my fault!  (I swear!)  I didn't have the quantity of beans called for in the recipe so I had to adjust...

 

They looked good....at first.  But they were oddly hard to mush.  Even with the help of permanent-marker-monster-hands!

See what I mean?

The yeah-right-you-call-this-mush? tasted pretty good on the crackers, but olive oil and garlic have a way of doing that...no matter what.  I think we overcooked both the beans and the garlic, but if anyone out there has suggestions for these beans, we're looking for guidance!  In the meantime, maybe we'll follow the recipe next time and see what happens.

Frozen Inventions

Here's a gadget I love: popsicle molds.  It's been getting pretty warm out here, so it was time to crank up the popsicle factory.

I basically put the kids in charge of this one, and let them at it.  They love to invent recipes, so these included some lemonade, orange juice, strawberry & rhubarb sauce and....a teeny sprite from the back of the fridge.  The scientist-chefs went to work, testing the first batch of 2010's popsicles.

A few hours later, we learned that sprite works, but the crystals are larger than juice-based pops.  Not ideal.

The list of ideas grew longer - thankfully summer begins early around here!

Turnips

Remember those baby turnips from the farmer's market I mentioned last time?

I had eaten perfect baby turnips last year in a little restaurant off an alley near Place Vosges in Paris and they were just about this size.  Why not recreate that moment, never mind the lack of rough-hewn stone walls, old wood, creaky floors and the haughty insistence of the host that we really needed a reservation but, since we were so early he'd see what he could do..., I opened Mastering the Art... and we were off!  It couldn't have been simpler.  We chopped the greens off, trimmed the tops and bottoms and washed them up.

No peeling, no blanching (because they were so small), they went right into the pot with enough chicken broth to nearly cover them and some butter (don't tell Julia, but I used 1/4 her recommended amount!)

They simmered for about 20 minutes, I cut them into halves and put them in little dishes: voila!

We ate them with a salad topped with the cranberry-shitake chicken mix and olive-oil drizzled avocados.  I was hoping the kids would hold true to stereotypes and dislike the turnips but they gobbled them up.  Sweet, tangy, buttery and brothy - they were delicious!  A grind of pepper suited me, but they didn't need anything else.

Bon Appétit!

Mushroom-Cranberry Chicken Wraps

We went to an outdoor concert this weekend and I wanted to make something we could put in a wrap, then use another way for dinner on Sunday.  Inspired by a similar recipe, we created this chicken saute. 

Slice three chicken breasts into 1 inch strips and season lightly with pepper and salt.

Saute in a non-stick pan, lighly sprayed with canola oil.

When the meat has cooked through, remove from the pan.  Deglaze with 2 TB of white wine or a flavorful vinegar (balsamic or brown rice, for example), add 6-8 fresh shitake mushrooms (sliced into thin ribbons) and a scant 1/4 cup dried cranberries. 

Cook over medium-low heat until the mushrooms are done, about 6 minutes.  Mix the chicken back in.

We took some whole-wheat flour wraps and added mayo and lots of lettuce, the chicken mix and wrapped them up.

After the concert, we found some amazing little turnips at the farmer's market - but we'll save those for tomorrow's post!

Go on, spoil your appetite!

It's an interesting thing, this business of having children.  Especially when you stumble on ideas that you've internalized as truths and therefore never question.  Sometimes those truths are good things ("Don't run with scissors!"  "Don't put pennies in your mouth!") and sometimes they're just leftovers.

"Don't spoil your appetite" is now a leftover, for me.

The main reason I began cooking with my children was that I had limited time to do two things that are important to me: spend time with them and make dinner. 

Dinner is much more than food at the end of the day.  I have wonderful memories of sitting around a wooden oval table with my sisters and parents, laughing, yelling, talking, teasing, and eating.  For the most part, it wasn't about the food, it was about the ritual.  We set the table.  We sat in the same places (heaven forbid you take someone else's favorite spot!).  We cleared the dishes (or tried to get out of it).  We spilled stuff.  We argued.  We sulked.  We talked.  We listened.  Sometimes it was chaos, but mostly it was sustenance.

I wanted to have some version of that with my own children.  Then reality and his unwanted guests (short tempers, late hours, ill-organized pantries, and hungry, tired children) come crashing through the door at 5:30, flinging the cozy memories out of the way.  Who wouldn't go for a quick fix with the pizza guy? 

I struggled for a long time (too long, honestly) to convince my children if they could just wait "a few minutes"  dinner would be ready "soon".  Yeah, right.

"Can't I just have a snack??"  My son would wail.

"No, because snacks are for the afternoon, and they will (here it comes) Spoil Your Appetite!"

Finally, worn down by the stress, I gave in.  "Here, have some cheese and crackers."

Amazing what happened next: he stopped complaining. 

Even more amazing: he stayed in the kitchen and talked to me. 

And even MORE amazing: he still ate his dinner.

So, now we're civilized.  We have some cheese and crackers before dinner.  Sometimes, we try unusual cheeses.  Then we cook.  Meanwhile, I've edited my list of truths.

New truth:  An appetizer makes for a more civilized appetite.

The Ones That Got Away

Sometimes, you forget about the back of the cupboard...where the line between ingredient and science experiment can get blurred.  I'm not sure whether to be amused or creeped-out by these alienesque yukon golds.

What more can I say?

What a Cream Puff

Sometimes, you go all out. 

We made desserts for a party a couple of weeks ago, and the profiteroles were a real treat.  What could be better than a pastry filled with cream and dunked in chocolate, really?  I've only made them a couple of times before with recipes from the Pie and Pastry Bible.  No single step in the process is difficult...but oh the time!  It's no wonder we don't have these every weekend.

The dough for the cream puffs is a simple flour-based mixture, cooked in a saucepan for just a few minutes.  Then you scoop it into an icing bag and pipe little blobs on a cookie sheet.  The kids had a great time learning to use the bag - it's as if all that training with play-dough was just to prepare them for this. 

The little blobs magically transform into little puffs in the oven, and after they've cooked a short time, you turn the oven off and they dry out while you head to the pool for a swim.

Delightful little hollow things! 

While we turned them over and made the holes, my son and I had a lengthy discussion of what a cream puff was, literally and in the pushover sense.  The pastry bag is then refilled with pastry cream (also easy to make stovetop, the day before) and a squirt of cream goes in the hole in the bottom of each puff. 

The choclate glaze in the cookbook was as easy as can be - microwaved cream over chocolate chips left to set until they melt.  Each puff was dipped in the choclate sauce and nestled on the platter.

You can see them in the back:

The recipe says they're best if eaten within three hours of being filled, so they were the last thing we made.  We have yet to know what they taste like past their three-hour-birthday, however.

Perfection in a puff.