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Fearless Leader's philosophy is that success is determined not by lack of failure, but how well you recover from failure. I had ample opportunity to consider this today while dispatching fava beans that came in our veggie box.
Fava beans are a colossal pain in the patoot. First you shell them.
Then you boil them, in order to loosen the skins.
Then you take off the skins and do something else with the rest of the bean, at which point fava beans are edible. I couldn't find the field notes that divulged that last step, so I looked at my cookbooks for guidance.
They weren't much help. Field of Greens recipes take the Julia Child approach, in which some kind person off camera has already prepared the beans. My vintage Joy of Cooking reveals that fava beans must have been unknown to American cooks in 1965. I decided to wing it.
While slipping them out of their skins, 10 went airborne, most gave up without a fight and some disintegrated on contact. They weren't going to be pretty, so I decided to make a minted fava puree. Tasted delicious but my brew was too liquid so I poured it back into the pan to reduce a bit.I had the heat on low, but my puree became a browned omelet in its pan as I simultaneously also carmelized onions, sauteeed greens, cooked beets and made dip.
It's brown but it's still very tasty (nutty, minty, like snacks from the Indian grocery). I'm setting my project aside and will serve it with eggs tomorrow morning.
Oh, and I found the field notes. These are the last favas of the season.
Shoot :)
Today we had a team offsite of the educational wing of the forklift company. We rapped, we presented, we asked questions, we drew pictures, we admired each other's work. Winding up our day was an assignment to go out in the world early and report back about what we did. Usually Mr Guy is the executive producer of The Observatory, but today Fearless Leader is.
I left the factory and my adventure was this: I rushed across town to the taco vendor to buy yen. But I missed the open hours, so they sent me to a different taqueria, where the foreign currency window stays open late. I was in line behind a (bike messenger?) (street musician?) (entrepreneur with the lightest overall coating of fine dirt?). He was trying to convert old money that had come to him in various ways. Some he found on the ground, some were given to him by someone who said "this is the equivalent of breakfast."
We in the room all agreed that these were handsome bills, but nobody knew what they were.
When the guy who handles the tough questions came out to identify the money, we learned that it was the "old currency" for Greece, Slovenia and Macao. None of it was legal tender, so the guy was plum out of luck. They were going to leave it at that.
Unable to stop myself from helping this guy, I asked the bank guys if the coin dealer still works across the street. Selling this former money as stuff seemed like the guy’s only hope for getting a breakfast worth of dollars out of defunct Slovenian cash. He left with no money, but a pocketful of advice from all of us about how to navigate the whims of the cranky pants coin dealer.
