A Bean of Another Sort

I'm in love with Fava Beans.  I've never actually eaten one prepared as an edible food.  There's even a can of them in my cupboard that I'm hesitant to open and eat.  Weird, totally weird you might say. Yup!

This part goes in the salad.  I'm going to stir-fry them soon.

Fava beans are cold hardy and can be planted early in the spring before frost danger has backed off.  They sprout right up and are covered with the most delicious grey-green leaves.  That's the part I love.  Salads made of all the edible green things that grow in my yard are what make my body strong and my heart sing at the dinner table. So before dinner, bits of all these are collected from the garden with heavy emphasis on the Fava Bean leaves.

Lush stand of beans obviously not diminished by
contributing leaves to our dinner table

You might think that a plant would have a tough time growing if all its leaves were pulled off.  That's undoubtably true.  So I always left the top three of four clusters--they grow in groups of five or six.

Very fat Favas on stems that are naked below--evidence
of my bean leaf theft

Now the plants are setting on beans. I've nibbled a few fresh and raw off the vine.  I know they aren't toxic, but it is clear they are best prepared some other way.

Unique blossoms of the Fava:  black and white

Soon I'll open that can in the cupboard and see if I like the beans.  Right now it's the greens I love.

Clean-Out-the-Crisper, Full-Circle Salad

Tired mushrooms, softening pepper, yellow carrots and
 half a beet found this spring over-wintered in the garden,
broccoli stalks, arugula gleaned  when one of the garden beds
was cleaned up  and fresh eggs from the girls.   Left over chicken (not shown)

I'm not a cook.  But I do cook. Most of the time it's fun.  And it's always part of the Things I get to do today, so I look for ways to be creative--most of the time. Sometimes I just look for ways to get my husband and myself fed. Not to be overlooked are those moments when the great cycles of life all converge:  "no food" in the house, meal time, fridge needs cleaning out.  Ever happen at your house?

Full-Meal Deal

This galactic converging slammed into my kitchen the other night.  We had Clean-Out-the-Crisper, Full-Circle Salad.  You immediately get emptying the fridge drawer onto the kitchen counter.  The salad also included bits of chicken and hard-boiled eggs. Not knowing which came first, I included the full circle.

Bolt Salad

I eat some pretty strange things.  My family can tell you that's true.  They tend to be more than a little suspicious of things I collect from the yard to eat.

Creamy blossom and bronze buds of bolted arugula

I love most greens, especially the spring, tender ones. Experimenting with new plants and eating different parts of the plant are Things I get to do today before dinner.  In the past I've been known to make salad entirely from weeds from between the rows, not lettuces in the rows.

Arugula is a hardy green by most standards. It sprouts up fast even in wet, cold weather. It refuses to die back in the fall when frost flattens most of the rest of the garden. And now (it's a biennial), it has bolted, getting ready to make seeds for the next time around. The blossoms have four, leggy petals in creamy yellow. I'm sure they are good to eat.

Tossed with rosemary olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.

So I collected flowers and leaves for our salad. Romaine, chard and sorrel were the other players.  It was delicious.  FYI: the flowers are sweet and fragrant tasting, not peppery like the leaves.

A Gathering of Greens

My favorite fresh salad is different and the same every time I make it.  It's the same because the list of ingredients is always the same:  whatever is currently growing in the yard.  It's different because whatever is currently growing changes just a little everyday.  "Gathering greens" isn't but could be on the "Things I get to do today" everyday.

If your pockets are empty and you want a feeling of tremendous abundance, take your kitchen container and wander around the garden/yard and pick a little from here and there until you have enough:  some tips from the fall-planted pea vines, a few sprigs of the fennel planted by Lynn a couple of years ago, leaves from the sorrel--a gift from Teresa before she moved, a handful of purslane (a common garden weed), a fistful of kale, a good-size bunch of Arugula that volunteered, a bit of dill (also a volunteer), blossoms from the calendula that grows wherever it's not actively pulled up once it is seeded,  blue borage blossoms (they are new in my garden this year, but I understand they do the same) and a whole color wheel of tomatoes.

Only the tomatoes took any care on my part to grow and even half of them were gifts from friend Susan.  Nearly everything came from the good heart of another person or just grew up on its own (volunteered).

Dinner from one the possible combinations of gathering greens.

The exquisite end result feeds much more than the body.  There are nutrients in this salad that will never exist in store-bought produce.  Plants grown with love feed us in a way the food grown for money never can.  Get out there a gather your greens*.

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*(Use your head.  Don't pick or pull up poisonous plants for your salad).