I have a fava bean tradition; it started one year ago with a risotto recipe I found that included fava beans.  The risotto recipe wasn’t even memorable, but the fava beans were great and I knew I wanted more. 

Problem was they were expensive.  I ended up paying something like $5 per pound for organic whole fava beans because I needed them and didn’t have time to shop around for a better price.  I thought the price was high but once I got home and started preparing the fava beans I realized it was actually very high.   See, fava beans have an excessive amount of natural packaging that includes an outer pod with cushioning foam and an inner sleeve.  It makes cooking them a bit tedious and I always wonder why nature felt they had to be so well packed.  Nevertheless, what all of that packaging means is that the $5 per pound I paid that time really translates into something like $20 per pound for just the beans.  I vowed never to buy fava beans again; I mean why buy something when you can grow it?  As with most beans they are pretty easy to grow.  Hence my fava bean tradition.  Every fall, I plant a row of fava beans.  Over the winter I watch them grow, and come spring I turn them into delicious meals including a must have Fricassee of Beef.  My garden yields about 10-15 pounds of whole fava beans which allows me to make 3 or 4 different fava bean dishes.  While it would be nice if the 3 or 4 servings of fava beans were spread out a bit more during the year that’s not how the garden works so for the next couple of weeks we’ll be trying out some new fava bean recipes and hopefully not get sick of them before the last harvest.  Of course by next fall I’ll be craving the next year’s harvest…

Five pounds of whole fava beans The shelled beans. Notice the foam-like packaging of the bean pod. The inner bean membrane. Finally, we get to the fava beans!

It's official, my winter garden is done.  We picked the final 8 pounds (!) of Fava beans this weekend and pulled the plants.  Its bittersweet - I'm going to miss the Fava beans.  This was my first attempt at growing Fava beans and they did wonderfully.  We got 3 harvests of beans; although the last harvest was rather big and could have easily been split into two harvests.  Of course the good news is that the end of the winter garden means the summer garden harvests are quickly approaching.  First up will be the garlic and sweet onions.  Ok, technically, they are from the winter garden, but they don't get harvested until late June, so in my book that's a summer garden.  Ah, but I digress, I was talking about Fava beans.

Each year when my vegetables are ready to be harvested the question is always the same.  What to do with way to many pounds of whatever vegetable?  Sometimes it's easy, as with tomatoes, but when it's cucumbers, zucchini or in this case Fava beans, the answer can be more difficult to find.  I planted the Fava beans with a specific recipe in mind but I wasn't going to make that yet again!  Luckily I found a great recipe that was wonderful once we adapted it to our tastes.  The recipe is Fricassee of Beef and Fava Beans from Bon Appétit.  We followed the basic recipe but we had 8 pounds of Fava beans (before shelling), we only used 1 pound of meat (which given the cost of beef tenderloin was a good thing), and we used half-and-half instead of whipping cream. We also added some vegetable broth to the sauce before cooking to increase the amount and we made mini-penne pasta and mixed it into the fricassee.  But otherwise we followed the recipe - what was left of it that is :).

The result, if I don't say so myself, was wonderful.  The sauce had a wonderful complex flavor that blended and balanced the flavor of the meat, the lemon juice and the Fava beans well.  As a pasta dish, the recipe was an all-in-one meal, which is one of my favorite types of meals.  And with the added broth the sauce was plentiful enough to fully coat the pasta.  We've definitely got another reason to grow Fava beans next year!  To bad it'll be nearly a year before we make this dish again...

Purple Basil

As I've written about before, I grow my entire garden from seed rather than purchase the plants.  I do this for a few reasons but the most compelling is the ability to pick specific varietals that match my culinary tastes.  This year's choices include sauce and slicing tomatoes as well as eggplant, basil, parsley, cucumbers, beans, and both summer and winter squash.  Each year I find it really difficult to limit myself to only a few vegetables.  Overall, this year I think I did fairly well but I did splurge on a few items.

Of course I had to get sweet basil, what would summer be without bunches of fresh basil and homemade pesto? But after reading about the many different types of basil I splurged and got purple basil seeds.  They should make a very pretty pesto, although I'm not sure how they differ in taste - that's part of the fun of gardening - trying new things....

I was a bit forced into two types of Eggplant because last year our Eggplants did not do well and I really want Eggplants this year. I choose Dusky, a more or less standard eggplant, that I've had success with in the past.  The other one I choose is Fairytale; an elongated eggplant that is supposed to taste best at its baby stage.  Hopefully one of them will do well.

A little eggplant.

My last set of choices are squash and I admit I probably got too many squash with two varietals of both summer (a Zucchini and a scaloppini) and winter (butternut and buttercup) squash.  My thought was that the winter squash will store and I'll only plant one of each!  We'll see how that goes but I'm really excited about the squash.  I've never grown (nor cooked) scaloppini - little flying saucer shaped summer squash (if you have recipes let me know!).  Same with the buttercup.  Hopefully we'll like both and if I have too much I can always leave them on my neighbor’s doorsteps!

One day last spring I was looking over the latest Cooking Light and eyed a Fava bean risotto.  I'm a huge risotto fan so the recipe which also had Arugula, fresh mozzarella, and Prosciutto immediately caught my eye.  The thing was though that I'd never had Fava beans before.  Nevertheless, I thought I'd give it a try and I'm glad I did.  The recipe was really good.  The only downside was that the Fava beans were really expensive.  That's why this fall when I saw Fava Bean seeds in the fall garden catalog I decided to grow my own.

Beans, and peas which are actually the family Fava Beans are part of, are pretty easy to grow.  The seeds get planted directly in the ground and with a bit of water they just grow.  Fall gardens in California also have the advantage of not requiring much water since they grow during our wet season.  I started the Fava beans about the same time as my snow peas, in late September, but the snow peas have been producing for well over a month.  I pretty much had given up on the Fava beans which is why I was really surprised last week to find that they had finally produced! 

With my first harvest, I made the "Fava Bean Risotto" from last year.  It’s a pretty easy meal except for the time spent podding the Fava beans.  It tasted great - even better knowing I made it from my own beans. 

I still have tons of buds on my Fava bean plants which means I should have several more harvests.  If anyone has some favorite Fava bean recipes I'd love to hear about them!