So here you go.

In these vids I show how to

1. Turn the burner on high with a puddle of water.
2. Put your rustically chopped veggies in, in the order of which takes longest to cook Build your flavor using the sacred quartet: oil, vinegar, salt, pepper
3. Pair with protein and carbs
4. And bring on the goodies to make Plain Jane fare rock your socks!

It’s as simple as that, and the clean-up is too. Plus I talk about eating seasonally, thrift, health, and how delicious this food revolution really truly is. Hope you come along. We’re having a blast…

As you can see, when fava beans are fresh picked young and tender, they are beautifully ready to go straight from the pods. No second peeling needed at all. I discovered this simply by working with fava beans from my own garden, and then was gratified to see Italian and Spanish cooks echoing my experience in their books.

With the double peel debate settled, then what to do with fava beans? First is to think of them like a fresh bean. Once you do that you can rock and roll just like I do in Hippie Kitchen. The official recipe is called Fava Bean Sass, a dish made by flash cooking the favas then tossing them with spicy peanut sauce that includes diced apple and shredded carrot to sweeten things. So simple. So delicious. So thrifty–especially if you planted favas in February and are now about ready to harvest them.

The main thing that makes a measure free hippie kitchen work, though, is getting on a roll with things. So once I’ve got a new vegetable or recipe idea in tow, I play-play. If you try this I think you’ll find that eating with the seasons–as in fava beans for days on end while they are the happening thing–does not get boring.

The second round with favas I suggest on page 54 of Hippie Kitchen is incorporating them into a grain salad with leftover millet, radishes, and raisins. A little dressing and you have a balanced spring primavera in one bowl.

Fun, you say, but there’s more favas coming through the door daily. No problem, flash cook them as always with spring onions and green garlic. Spoon the works into warm corn tortillas and top with blue cheese. Then name this Fava Bean Heaven.

———-I hope I’ve piqued your interest in these early summer beans. They are great since along with the peas they are among the first food to grace our gardens and appear in the markets. And if you aren’t growing them just yet and do have to buy favas that need double peeling, don’t give up. Once they are flash cooked, they pop right out of their casings whether the cook does it all ahead or people do it themselves–together at the table while they slow down to relish the harvest whether it’s in a hash, warm salad, or pizza pie.

Laurel Robertson, who wrote Laurel’s Kitchen with Carol Flinders, is some kind of woman. This salad is adapted from their pages where they titled it “Astonishing.” I’ve made it many times over the years, and it’s my privilege to translate it into a measure free format.

What I especially like about this vegetarian and vegan approach to a spinach salad is that it springs from the more traditional approach which relies on hot bacon fat to wilt the greens. So smart of Laurel and Carol to figure out a different approach to a warm dressing—a dressing that not only succeeds in taming your fresh garden spinach but also one that is pretty darn sexy with its polite pour of dry white wine.

If you’re still buying canned beans, here’s a vid to inspire you to keep your money and take back your kitchen. After all a big pot of beans freezes up in to small containers beautifully and you’re set for a week or two.

Once we tasted her pumpkin pie and declared it a home run clear up, over and out of the park–every bit as good as the ones mama used to make–she divulged her secret.

“Acorn squash from the garden.” To her husband’s lifted brows, she explained that she was darned if she’d buy official pumpkin when she had perfectly good winter squash in the house.

Laura with some of her Liberty apple harvest a couple years ago

Yes! This is the kind of talk thrifty, innovative cooks understand. Cooks who are primarily concerned with where their ingredients are sourced. Cooks who realize that threads running through flavor and sustainability and health will make whole cloth if we just let them.

Speaking of health. Laura didn’t stop with the filling for her pumpkin pie. She made her butter crust from 100 percent whole wheat pastry flour–flour that I’d bet half a hundred, came from the organic bulk bins.

Yah. My kind of eating. My kind of cook. Laura gets it.

(Camera was nowhere in sight to capture Laura’s acorn squashes or her 2009 pie, but here’s one of my own winter squash harvests. Those spaghetti squashes are such charmers piled up in their basket.)

This slaw is out of Beyond Measure (page 139). I patterned it after a green papaya salad I learned to make when I was in Bangkok. It’s easy, affordable, healthy, and delicious–so much so that I’m featuring it in cooking classes this spring along with a hot and spicy shrimp soup, Thai-style.

Green papayas, of course, are plentiful in Thailand. But here, you have to go to an Asian market to get this exotic fruit. So what I’ve done is acted like a Thai would and substitute the ubiquitous, cheap cabbage for the papaya.

A couple caveats: when you use dates for the sweet instead of sugar, eaters have to get a nibble of date with each bite to make it work. My rule of thumb: when serving people who like to steer clear of sugar, use the dates–otherwise the sugar melts in with the lime juice more evenly.

Another couple tips from talking with Eldie recently. Do use a box grater to shred things. It makes the fine translucent bits that make this slaw a happening thing. Also, use plenty of lime juice–as in fresh. Like 4-6 for a head of cabbage wouldn’t be too much at all.I did this slaw with young girls 8-12. Without measurements, they started out very timid and slowly with just a tiny bit of this and that.

Then we’d taste and everyone would look at each other and say, “I don’t get anything yet, do you?” Then they’d go back at yet. We’d taste again. Etc. Etc. It didn’t take long, though, before the girls were proudly offering their well dressed, zingy slaw to people in the audience.

Who says tabbouleh must always be made with Bulgar wheat and the requisite parsley and mint. Surely not a creative cook who understands grain salads. Ditto for Spring Salad on a Theme of Radishes and  Jicama from Cooking Beyond Measure. No need to start with spaghetti squash if there’s a pot of quinoa all cooked up and just waiting to be chosen in the fridge.

That’s what I did at two cooking demonstrations hosted by the Multnomah County Library recently. Paired quinoa with all manner of fresh spring vegetables plus a few surprises. The dish earned rave reviews at each event, and everyday cooks in attendance said they were inspired to try Spring Salad at home. I hope you are as well. It’s easy. It’s delicious. It’s very polite to our bodies and the planet.

We’ve identified the problem with SAD, the Standard American Diet. These days, most know that shopping the perimeter of the grocery is a healthier, more affordable way to fill the larder than schlepping into the inner aisles for things in crinkly packages. Many more are hip to the local, seasonal buzz that has centered the delicious revolution in one’s own eco-region, if not one’s own backyard. Yet, we keep consuming more ready to eat food than our health and wealth can stand. Why?

Culinary history suggests formal recipes have put too fine a point on cooking. At the end of a long day, few of us are in the mood for doing the equivalent of a small chemistry experiment when all we want is dinner.

Besides, following rote directions from elite cooking authorities in your own kitchen isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here they got to have all the fun of creating the recipes, and we’re pretty much relegated to being technicians. Putting on your reading glasses to make dinner? What’s wrong with this picture?

Americans only got measuring cups in the early 1900s, and everyday cooks around the world today still go with the flow. Back in the 1950s when renowned British foodie, Elizabeth David studied Mediterranean food, the Italians welcomed her into their kitchens, but they took little interest in quantities or measurements. According to David’s official biographer, Artemis Cooper (Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David), “David marked a jug out in both imperial and metric measurements, and on occasions ‘I stood over the cooks and simply forced them to show me what they meant by a handful.’”

The late food and wine critic who loved France so much he moved there, Richard Olney, did the same thing, but with clear reservations. In his introduction to Lulu’s Provencal Table, published in 1994, Olney writes that imprisoning the art of cooking in chilly formulas is like robbing a bird of flight.

The point is, of course, that we’d probably cook more great tasting, healthy, affordable food if we left our measuring cups behind.  That’s why I included this easy-peasy way to roast roots in Cooking Beyond Measure. They are esp good with homemade ketchup.

In other words, simple everyday cooking just isn’t that difficult and the food you’ll turn out will be right up there with Garrison Keillor’s Powdermilk Biscuits—the ones “that give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.” That’s what cooks in the world’s great ethnic traditions who cook creatively know. That’s what our ancestors knew. And that’s what we can rediscover ourselves.

With Barack Obama–our 44th history-making president– poised to take the helm, we’re all thinking about the inauguration. What better way to celebrate than making Inauguration Slaw 44.

Indeed, this slaw represents what Mr. Obama is about and what he’s asking from us as Americans. It’s about change–change in our consumption habits, both in the markets and in our kitchens. It’s about cooking for the new economy and our health–eating well even as we tighten our belts. It’s about getting out the grater.

More, slaws are quintessential winter foods since cabbage, carrot, and onion figure prominently–and are most likely items available closer than farther from our communities this time of year. Inauguration Slaw 44 embraces this local, seasonal ethnic fairly faithfully, although in a celebratory, extravagant moment I did purchase a jicama grown in Mexico and shred some of that into the mix, using the large holes on the grater to give the exotic food the attention it’s due.

This simple Inauguration Slaw 44 is also dressed for success. It’s designed to put a lavish sparkle in our eyes. An invigorating  sparkle that will allow us to go the distance our president asks.

Thanksgiving Breakfast complete with Cottage Cream and KBJ’s Cranberries is such gorgeous food–as delicious as it is healthy and affordable.

Indeed, that’s what measure free cooking is all about. But a cookbook without measurements and prescriptive rote directions is so unprecedented that people tend can get wrapped up in the novelty, forgetting the point.

That Thanksgiving Breakfast is delicious, is clear from the photo. So let’s talk health and wealth. The yam that I shined with oil, baked and sliced into rounds didn’t lose any nutrients by being boiled and packed into cans. It also costs pennies–since there’s no extra 10 to 50 percent added to cover processing and packaging.

Ditto for KBJ’s Cranberries, an uncooked compote of fresh crans, sweet oranges, and pomegranate seeds. Not only do we get all the nutrition that fresh seasonal produce offers, the lovely flavors tantalize so much that we didn’t even consider inviting sugar to the party. Oranges are affordable right now, and we’ve already saved by not buying canned yams or cranberry sauce, so we can splurge a little on the small amount of cranberries needed and a pomegranate that will have all who enjoy it feeling very festive indeed.

Cottage Cream, as well, which is just a carton of cottage whizzed up in the blender, is high-protein, yummy, and easy on the food bill. No need to pay a premium for those spendy little cottage cheese and fruit thingies that have appeared in the stores the last few years. It’s easy, gratifying, and fast to make your own.

So, rock and roll during the holidays. There’s no need to break the bank–or eat food that’s not good for us. Just cling to the perimeter of the store, spend extra time fingering the seasonal produce, and then get ready to be enticed in the privacy of your own kitchen.

The beauty and feel of fresh food: the leathery pomegranates, the solid tubers. The sounds and smells of things when they’re freshly chopped–cranberries that pop, zesty fragrant oranges. The empowerment that comes leaving off following rote instructions and taking command. The secret joy & knowledge that you are practicing thrift even as you are offering high quality food to those gathered together.