Weekly Dish

I love to learn about new foods. One of the great things about reading other people’s food blogs is that I often come in contact with ingredients that are unfamiliar to me, and then I end up running into them somewhere else.

The weekly ARF/5-a-day event over at Sweetnicks keeps me trying to incorporate vegetables into our diet, and with spring upon us, I’d been searching for new veggies to love. Then, last week, I read Rorie’s post about her favorite spring risotto, with shallots, red onions, and fava beans. I’d never seen fava beans, much less cooked with them, so when I saw them at my farmer’s market on Saturday, I grabbed them.

I intended to make Rorie’s risotto, but, as often happens with my good intentions, I didn’t quite have everything I needed. No red onions or shallots to be found in my pantry. Besides, I didn’t have any homemade vegetable stock on hand either, and it’s really getting too warm outside to leave a burner on for that long in my kitchen. So, I set about prepping my beans, dug around in the fridge and the pantry, and ended up with this pasta.

What I didn’t know going into it is that preparing fresh fava beans for cooking is a bit of a process. They look like gigantic, engorged snow peas or butter beans in their shells, which are my very favorite springy green color (my kitchen is almost the very same green as a matter of fact!) Once you unzip their little pouches, you’ll find large, kidney-shaped beans buried inside, resting on pillows of blankety fuzz. After you pop them from their shells, then you blanch them, and then, you must peel the individual beans, removing the translucent casing on the outside. The outer peeling slides right off, so it’s not difficult, but it would be fairly time-consuming to go through this process for more than one armload of favas.

In the end, it was worth it; this pasta tastes as bright and springy as it looks, bites of sweet-salty ham and soft, caramelized sweet onions alternate with the earthy crunch of the edamame-esque beans beneath a light coating of cream and freshly grated Parmesan.

If you spy some fava beans at your local market, grab them while you can; the farmer who sold them to me warned me that their season is fleeting.

Spring Bean Pasta

1 cup of fresh fava beans, shelled (the amount in the picture above yielded about a cup of beans)
1 t. olive oil
1 cup ham, diced (I used honeybaked ham)
1/2 a sweet yellow onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup white wine
1/2 cup heavy cream or half and half
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to taste
3/4 pound pasta (I used rotini)

First, prepare your beans. After they’ve been shelled, fill a pot with about 2 inches of water (just enough to cover the beans), and bring the water to a boil. Add the beans and cook for about 4-5 minutes. Immediately drain and plunge into cold water. Let the beans cool. When they’re cool enough to handle, run your fingernail or a small knife around the outer casing, removing it from each bean.
Set the cooked, peeled beans aside. Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente. Drain, and set it aside too.

In a large skillet heat a teaspoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the ham and cook for a minute or two. Add the chopped onion and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook for about 5-7 minutes, or until the onion turns golden and soft. Add the carrots and garlic and reduce the heat back to medium. Cook until all the vegetables are soft and the onions are nice and caramelized, about another 5 minutes. Add the beans, and sprinkle with salt.

Pour in the wine, stirring until it evaporates. Douse the skillet with the cream, continuing to stir until the ham and vegetables are nicely coated. If you prefer to have a saucier pasta, you can add milk or more wine here. Serve the ham-vegetable sauce on top of a handful of noodles; top generously with grated Parmesan. Serves 4.

This recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesday over at Sweetnick’s.

Posted: Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 2:31 pm Filed under: Main Dish, Vegetables, Pasta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.