A peculiar thing

 

Fava beans. Broad beans if you're a Brit. Before I ever tried them I had heard that they were quite the thing. I read a lot of literature that likened them to the first, faintest whiff of early summer, that enthused about their sweet tenderness as if they were a type of vegetable crack. I was completely seduced by the idea of long, leisurely hours spent double-shelling them on a sun-drenched Italian terrace with my nearest and dearest, glasses of crisp white wine and hunks of pecorino at hand.

I couldn't wait to try them. I had already fallen for them, in theory! But, in reality, it was not destined to be love at first sight. Sweet they were not, only unpleasantly musty. They had a solid starchiness that positioned them somewhere between a fresh and dried bean. I guess they weren't completely awful, but they certainly weren't sweeping me off my feet.

Still, I was pretty invested in liking them so I arranged a second date, then a third. I expanded my test group to include the large, twisted pods from Fairway, the tiny ones fresh from the Campus Community Garden that only needed a single-shelling, and everything in between. Yet, despite my best efforts, I remained fairly ambivalent towards them.

I thought that's what we were. Acquaintances, maybe friends, purely platonic either way. Then, last Spring, I noticed a very peculiar thing. First of all, throughout the year I'd been collecting fava bean recipes. I had a whole pile of them. When I saw some in the store I bought them. I brought them home and cooked them. I ate them, to a ho-hum reception, and then, and this is the thing, I did it again. Whenever I had the chance I would do it again - buy, cook and eat 'em. What was going on?

For a vegetable I was supposedly neutral about we were spending a lot of time together. There was the ragout thrown over pasta, a green-tinged panzanella. I ate them raw with cheese and radishes, cooked with bacon and dill.

This year it happened again. I started ear-and-bookmarking broad bean recipes. My compulsion grew stronger than the season and I bought a bag of frozen ones at Fairway. I made quinoa, radish and avocado salad, hot yogurt soup, and marinated mushrooms, all with the help of those favas. Before long I had bought another bag, now long gone and which would have been replaced were I not moving and trying to clear out the freezer.

Where do we stand now, me and the favas? When it's just the two of us, we can't seem to get it together. But throw in a bit of that, and a snatch of this, and it's alright. Somehow a whole mess of things will coalesce into a great, delicious whole. I don't know if I like fava beans but I know I like this:

Marinated Mushrooms with Walnut and Tahini Yogurt
From Plenty

I wouldn't worry too much about acquiring fresh dill and oregano for the final garnish. If you have some great, if not use whatever herbs you have at hand - parsley, cilantro, it'll work just fine.

1/3 cup olive oil
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp maple syrup
juice of 2 medium lemons (divided use)
salt and black pepper
3 cups sliced button mushrooms
2 cups beech (shimeji) mushrooms, large base removed
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
2 1/2 tbsp tahini
1 small garlic clove, crushed
3 cups shelled fava beans (frozen or fresh)
2/3 cup walnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp chopped dill
1 tbsp chopped oregano

Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, maple syrup, half the lemon juice, about 1/2 tsp salt and some black pepper. Pour this over the mixed mushrooms in a large bowl and toss well, making sure all the mushrooms are coated. Leave to marinate for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl mix together the yogurt, tahini, garlic, remaining lemon juice and 1/2 tsp salt. Use a fork or small whisk to whip everything together to a light paste. (You can refrigerate this sauce for up to one day).

Next, pour plenty of boiling water over the fava beans in a bowl and leave for a minute, then drain well and leave to cool down. Squeeze each bean gently to remove the skin and discard it (if your beans are small or you don't mind the skin you can skip this step).

Add the beans, walnuts, and cumin to the marinated mushrooms and stir well to mix. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Serve the mushrooms in small bowls or plates, each portion topped with a dollop of thick tahini sauce and sprinkled with herbs.

Serves 4

5:10

Can we talk? It won't take long. And it just might change your life. Maybe!

The month of May motored by, June joined the fray and, what do you know, it's already almost over! Are you busy? I sure am - leaving my job, planning a trip to Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Switzerland, writing letters like there ain't a tomorrow, and, as if that weren't enough, throwing moving into the mix.

In such helter-skelter times I'm happy to turn to the egg. The ever-dependable, infinitely-variable egg. Whether it be the blue or brown spotted or pale green pride of a chicken, the freckled find of a quail, or, with good fortune like mine, a dozen duck eggs bulging out of their carton. The latter have nearly impenetrably strong shells and yolks so luminous and large, so thick and viscous, I am nothing but in awe. They are some eggs.

And how do I eat all these eggs? Let me count the ways! Sizzled in olive oil to a crisp, brown-laced edge. So softly scrambled as to be barely set. Poached in a gauze of white. Hard-boiled, straight-up with a shake of salt. "Poochie" in a little egg cup with a spoon and strips of buttered toast. My family tends to invent words and "poochie" is our term for soft-boiled. It's a style I've been rather enamoured with lately.

Now, there are many, many, many schools of thought regarding the proper technique for the perfect hard or soft-boiled egg. Should you add the eggs to cold water then bring it to a boil or add the eggs to already boiling water? Should you simmer them for 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 minutes or should you take them off the heat immediately, clamp on a lid and let them sit for 10 or 11 or 11-and-a-half or 12 minutes? How do you choose your method? And, in all that crush of information, how do you remember it?

Well, one night at work there was a special - salmon, I think - served with a soft-boiled egg. The most gorgeous soft-boiled egg I'd ever had the pleasure of partaking in - its yolk a gush of gold wrapped in fragile, creamily-set white. I asked my co-worker how he did it and all he said was 5:10. What? Then it came back to me - last summer, borrowing the Momofuku cookbook from the library, copying out all the recipes to do with egg-cookery, forgetting about them.

I went home, found the recipe, put on some water, plopped in an egg and soon enough had my own glorious soft-boiled specimen. I made another the next morning for breakfast. I've been making them this way ever since. Perfect and perfectly easy soft-boiled eggs! Put them on top of anything - be it salad, vegetable or grain - and you'll never be hungry again. That's the life-changing part.

Perfect Soft-Boiled Eggs (aka 5:10 Eggs)

From Momofuku

Large eggs, as many as you like

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Gently lower the eggs, in their shells, into the boiling water with a slotted spoon or spider. (Some will crack, though they should still be usable even if they're not beautiful). Set a kitchen timer for 5 minutes and 10 seconds from the moment the eggs go into the water, and prepare an ice water bath for the eggs in a large, deep mixing bowl.

When the timer rings, use the spoon or spider to transfer the eggs to the ice water. Peel the eggs when they are cool enough to handle, cracking them open on a cutting board and then peeling them underwater, in the bowl. (The little bit of water that sneaks in between the shell and the white helps with the peeling). Reserve the eggs in the fridge until ready to use, or for up to 8 hours. Warm them for a minute under hot running tap water before serving.

Makes as many as you decide to make!

Here

People, it is that sorta day.

When you meet your "village" for pancakes and chocolate milk and never mind that there are tubs of margarine and bottles of Aunt Jemima (that make you wish you had brought a stick of butter, slick of maple syrup and jar of peanut butter instead). There are so many faces you know and so many you don't, an old co-worker to hug and chalked-up pavement to sit on with friends while music way too loud for 9:30 pounds into your head. There are balloons and ice cream cones, fire trucks and 80-year-old Norwegian dancers, sparkly kites, your favourite Zumba song and a gigantic inflatable obstacle course (which you have now decided you want for your birthday party this year)!

When the sun shines and you suddenly realize you are overdressed.

When you bike to the Moss Street Market - the first full one of the year and it is full - of people and motion and laughter, rippling in the act of gather. There are sausages being fried in onions that smell like the best kind of caramel, handmade patchwork stuffed animals, a little dog so small and noble and well-behaved you think, for the first time in your life, you might like one. A kale bonsai tree, a man who cracks apricot kernels for medicine and a bunch of little beets, sweet and striped inside, like a secret prize, that you know you will eat with meltingly ripe, ash-dusted goat cheese. 

When the wind blows (confused, in a tangle) sending whirls of tissue paper pink cherry blossoms up around you (there is no end of things in the heart).

When you drop by Fairfield Market and there are so many small wonders packed inside that you wish there were a tiny community store like this on your street - full of mixing and mingling, the blast of steam and waft of roasting coffee, counters lined with just-picked specials - tight tauts of asparagus (from Cowichan Bay),  duck eggs and heaps of flowering kale!

When mangoes are the juiciest and drippiest and sweetest they've ever been.

When you go to Finest at Sea because you've heard spot prawn season has begun and oh, it has - they're throwing them, jolting and alive, right onto the grill, dousing them with olive oil and garlic and lemon juice and herbs and you eat two - huge and hot and crunchy, sweet and charred, every bit of them, even the snap of the head, juicy pure, spilling down your hand. When you bring home a pound, alive, feelers poking through plastic, probably dripping everywhere, balloon to your backpack and everywhere you go people are looking at each other, in the eye, and smiling. 

And, just now, sitting in the backyard, under the shade of the birch tree, pollen dropping between the cracks of your keyboard, your neighbour gives you four shit-stained eggs, from Hagar Line and Henrietta, and you are so glad you live here, in this city, in this village, on this day, on this street, in this house, here.

Oh, it is that sorta day. 

Avocado, Mango and Spot Prawn Tacos
Adapted from Martha Rose Shulman

1 pound live spot prawns
glug of olive oil
1 clove garlic, sliced
1/2 serrano chile, minced
1 tsp whole cumin, toasted and ground
1/2 large mango, peeled and roughly chopped
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
juice of 1 lime
1/2 avocado, sliced
3 corn tortillas

Haul out your BBQ, light it with a whoosh and turn everything up as high as it will go. Shut the lid and leave to preheat for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, gather all your ingredients and make sure they're ready to go. This comes together quickly! Also, preheat your oven to 350 F.

Throw the prawns onto the grill and cook them for about 2 minutes, or until they start to char. Flip them over and cook a minute or two longer. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly, enough so you can handle them. You want to rip off their heads (eating the occasional one), pull off their legs and basically peel them. Save  the heads and legs and shells though because you can make a bitchin' stock with them.

Once you're almost done this task and thinking how little you ended up with, start heating a cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Pour in a glug of olive oil, add the garlic and saute for a minute or so, stirring frequently. Add the chile and saute for 30 seconds, or until fragrant. Add the cumin, mango, most of the cilantro leaves and prawns, which you should have finished peeling by now. Put the tortillas in the oven to warm - they take about thirty seconds on each side. Cook the prawn mixture for about a minute, just to heat everything through, then add the lime juice and turn off the heat. Taste and adjust seasonings - add a bit of salt and crack of black pepper if you like.

Place the tortillas on a plate, divide the prawn mixture evenly between them, top with avocado, the remaining cilantro leaves and you're done!

Enough for 1. Double or triple or quadruple accordingly!

A suggestion

What should you do the first day it's actually warm out? (Actually, sit-in-the-sun, glow-in-your-bones from the legs to your toes to the tip of your head warm out.) You might want to go for a bike ride with your boy, chugging up hills, ripping off your toque and gloves when they become unnecessary, pointing to flowers and backyards with awesome treehouses (note to self: live in a treehouse when you grow up), stopping at the Root Cellar for apples and to eat most of the watermelon samples. You might discover that your tire has a gash in it - the tube protrudes right through. You might press on regardless. Your tube might pop. You might find a perfect picnic spot, mostly quiet, in a meadow filled with flowers, shafts of sunlight and hardly any wind. You might get dandelion pollen all over your pants, but that's okay. You might eat apples and skordalia and turnips and their greens, homemade oatmeal bars and barely thawed bread (and curse yourself for not bringing more). You might read an entire book of poetry and finish it off with a hunk of cheese. You might feel like you've been dreaming, in another world. You might walk to Cadboro Bay for trail mix and find duck legs on sale at Peppers. This is the start of it!

The next day you might walk to MEC to get a new tire, this time stopping at Cascadia for a cinnamon bun. You might squint your eyes and wrinkle your nose to discover it sore from the sun yesterday, and more today. You might successfully change your tire, mount your steed and barely thirty seconds later hear the crack of your boyfriend's tube exploding so violently it rips actual chunks of metal from the wheel rim, leaving it in shreds. You might continue, on foot, to the Moss Street Market. You might start to feel impatient.  Once there you might choose a swath of overgrown mustard greens and your boyfriend might carefully, dawdlingly, select a pound of potatoes. That's the next of it!

At home your annoyance might billow as all the little things to do swirl up and around you when really, all you want to do is sit outside in that glorious sun. You might realize how terribly sad you are now that today is the last day - your boyfriend is leaving you tomorrow (temporarily) to become an evergreen farmer. You might spread peanut butter on celery, sprinkle raisins on top, call it ants on a log and cry. That's necessary too.

And then you might cook. Those duck legs with potatoes and just a few other things - onion and a snatch of thyme. Panettone bread pudding. (So simple! The bread being what it is you don't even need more butter or sugar or even fruit. You just slice it into large cubes, toast them to a handsome brown, whip up two eggs with 3/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup cream, soak the toasted cubes in that for about 5 minutes, ladle into a greased baking dish that goes into a water bath in a 350 F oven until the custard sets and the top crusts (a toothpick will come out clean)). You might eat outside, rolling up your sleeves and removing your socks, devouring crispy skin, gamy meat and crunchy fat-soaked potatoes sopped with sharp greens. You might think how filling it all is, the fat, the sun, the simple sigh from the guy across the picnic table from you. You might feel perfectly satiated.

Roast Duck and Potatoes
Adapted from French in a Flash 

The original recipe called for scallions (which might be nice) and peas (which won me over) but I didn't have either. Next time! Also, as I did not have any herbes de Provence in my otherwise extensive spice drawer I used my imagination and crumbled some dried thyme, rosemary, tarragon and oregano together. Turns out, standardly, herbes de provence is a mixture of savoury, fennel, basil and thyme. Work with what you've got!

1 pound small, buttery potatoes (or more, if you like)
1 medium onion
1 sprig fresh thyme
1/2 tbsp plus 1/2 tsp olive oil
2 duck legs, thighs attached
herbes de Provence (see note above)
coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Slice the potatoes into thirds. Peel the onion, leaving the root end intact, then slice into rough chunks held together by that root end. Toss the potatoes and onion with the thyme, 1/2 tbsp olive oil and salt and pepper. Slide into the oven to start softening.

Trim any excess fat off the duck and reserve. Rub the legs with the remaining 1/2 tsp olive oil, sprinkle with the herbes de provence and season with salt and pepper. Heat a cast-iron skillet (oh boy it's going to love this!) over medium-high heat and add the reserved duck fat so that it starts to render. (You can eat any pieces that go particularly crisp.) Place the duck legs skin side down into the pan and sear for about 4 minutes, until the skin is beautifully golden. Flip and sear for another minute.

Place the duck legs on top of the roasting vegetables. (If you like, you can also toss the vegetables with any duck fat left over in your skillet). Cook for 30 to 35 minutes, until the juices run clear. Rest for a couple minutes then serve on a bed of sharp greens to provide contrast and soak up the juicy fat. Eat and be full, in the richest sense of the word.

Serves two.

And I crumble

Cheer up! Those winters winds can't blow much longer. The sun is in the shine of the air. The farmers' markets have started up again! The first weekend I went made me feel as sheer and sparkling as the bundles of cool, crisp greens that screamed with aliveness. I left with tiny turnips (their greens are, bar none, the best), an unruly bunch of purple mottled mustard greens (that choked my nostrils with their fiery fumes) and, perhaps best of all, the last two bags of Jerusalem artichokes of the season (and only $2 a pound!!).

The next weekend there was rhubarb(!), more turnips, sticky raw honeycomb and some unusual Japanese greens breaking into bright yellow flower. I like going to the market, saying hello. The honey vendor was having an existential crisis as to whether he ought to follow in his father's beekeeping footsteps. The guy who sold me the rhubarb had me pegged when he said I was going to make a crisp with it. He wasn't wrong. I already had the topping waiting for me at home, in the fridge. 

My favourite crumble topping. Bold words, but true. I've used it over and over and over again and I never disagree. The first time I followed the recipe to a T - topping apples and pears with its nutty, buttery, chocolatey rubble. Next I made a Spring version using my rhubarb and some frozen blueberries. Once the whole shubauble was in the oven I worried that pecans and pistachios, grassy quinoa and tangy chocolate wouldn't wear well with my chosen fruit. But it turned out just fine, and I spooned it up outside, as is proper, bouts of warmth upon my face interspersed with chill winds down my bones.

I think it might work with anything. On Easter Sunday I covered a pie with it - rhubarb and blueberry again. (That rhubarb was mighty hard to procure! Back roads and half a dozen grocery stores later, David's mom finally found some. Good thing! David, his Dad and I were walking around the community gardens at Colony Farm and nearly every plot had a towering rhubarb plant. I was itching so badly to break off just a little stalk here and just a wee one there.) There were even more deviations that day - almonds instead of the normal nuts, half quinoa and half buckwheat flour, more oats due to a teff flour shortage - but again, the same stupendous results. The crumble pebbles whatever you place underneath it and it is impossible to pick out what is tart, what is chocolatey, what is crunchy. How can something burst with so much character? Sometimes, after I've pinched it all together into rich clumps, I slowly lick my fingers and smile. Even raw it is fantastic! It's the bee's knees, the best of the bunch.

My Favourite Crumble Topping
From La Tartine Gourmande

I'm only including the directions for the crumble topping here. Use it with whatever bottom you like - in a crumble, a top a tart or pie! I'm not giving directions for that business because you can be your own boss there. Keep in mind though that the original recipe had you bake the crumble at 375 F. Don't chop the nuts too finely or they might burn.

3/4 cup quinoa flour
1/4 cup teff flour
1/4 cup old-fashioned oats
3 oz. (85g) dark chocolate (70% cocoa), coarsely chopped
1/4 cup (40g) pecans, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup (40g) unsalted, shelled pistachios
pinch coarse sea salt
1/4 cup (50g) blond cane sugar
1/4 cup (50g) demerara sugar
7 tbsp (105g) cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

Combine all the ingredients except the butter. Work the butter in using a pastry cutter (okay), a fork (alright) or your fingers (best!) until a coarse crumble forms. Use as desired.

Makes enough for 6 individual (1 cup) crumbles or 1 pie.


P.S: You may have noticed (and if you haven't you will now) that there is a (new!) recipe index for your perusal!