Umbrian Inspired Favas

Organics to You has been bringing us fresh fava beans for a few weeks now and I've repeatedly put them into a green bag in the fridge until I figure out what to do with this new produce. Tonight I finally decided to cook up the pile of them as inspired by a recipe I found online for an Umbrian fava bean stew, Scafata. I didn't have the ingredients exactly so I winged it quite a bit (so no exact recipe, just technique follows).

The result was very tasty! Here's a rough outline of what I used and did:

Roughly 3 pounds of unshelled, fresh Favas were used in the dish. I combined them with a small onion, 3 cloves of garlic, a small bunch of green garlic spears, a bulb of fennel, and 2 large stalks of celery. The onion was sauteed in olive oil along with the bulb garlic, then the celery, fennel, green garlic and the shelled beans. Once they all got going nicely and the fennel was softened a little I layered the chopped kale on top then topped it with a lid.

Once the kale began to wilt a little I added some thinly sliced, fresh sage and basil. I tossed everything together carefully to get the kale and herbs down into the rest of the veggies, then covered again. I added a splash of Vinho Verde we had on hand since it seemed like a little more moisture would help and covered again.

After the kale had fully softened I added some dried dill and marjoram (didn't have fresh, seems like thyme would be nice too) as well as salt and pepper. At this time I diced up 3 tomatoes and tossed them in. Given that the original recipe comes for Italy I decided to add some champagne vinegar as well as some balsamic & fig vinegar.

Simmer on low until the outside of the beans was tender - total cooking time was a little over an hour since it takes a while for the skins of the fresh favas to get tender. I served this with some garlic/pepper tempeh braised with balsamic vinegar.

Totally delicious and I'll certainly make again!

Balsamic Tempeh & Quinoa

More Food Porn - really, this is just my way of gloating about something delicious I made so I can figure out the recipe later. Is that obvious?

Tonight was a discussion at the Dharma Center and we include some potluck food to share for our dinner. I've been trying to make something fairly hearty so we don't end up feeling hungry during meditation afterward. Plus if no one else remembers to bring anything vegan Christie and I have something for us.

She made chocolate chip cookies earlier today. I was in charge of "dinner".

First was to chop up all the cucumbers in the fridge and add in some vinegar. This was really was to get them out of the fridge to make way for the 1 "boothy blonde", 1 suyo, and 7 lemon cucumbers that Chrsitie picked yesterday!

For the real meal I thought of using the last of the leftover red qunioa. In the afternoon I grilled up all the summer squash from the garden on the cast iron, let it cool and diced it up. In went thinly chopped up Italian parsley and the last of the slightly limp looking basil.

I sauteed half a sweet onion and diced tempeh, added a little red bell pepper, and when that was all fried up nicely I roughly chopped up a large, over-ripe, heirloom tomato the neighbor had brought over yesterday. This immediately turned into a thin sauce coating the temepeh. All of this went right into the qunioa, squash and herbs.

For a dressing some balsamic and white wine vinegars whisked up with raw tahini, rice milk, and a little whole-grain mustard.

Christie's Quick Late Summer Veggie Pasta

Yummy!  I should let her post about it!  Lots of Trader Joe's stuff in tonight's dinner!    I believe everything came from TJ's unless it came from the garden.

We had sprouted wheat parpadalle pasta tossed with some artichoke antipasto stuff, topped with a Middle Eastern zucchini from our garden sauteed with garlic paste, spinach, and lemon juice.  Add some diced tomatoes from the garden and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and that's dinner!

Dinner was very quick, hence Christie's name for the dish, and a lovely way to appreciate more of the tasty things we planted this summer.  I especially enjoyed her use of "quick" and "late" following one another in the dish name.