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...