The neighbor around the corner can’t keep up with her plums so I went over and nabbed a couple baskets. Now they’re out there. In the kitchen cooking down in a big pot of mindfulness. Not sure just what will come of them yet. But it’s all fun. Actually, it’s all work. But it’s work I seem drawn to when harvest begins rolling around yet again. The gathering in of it all. The not letting food go to waste. The preserving for winter. It’s true. I’m smitten.

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…

But generating measure free recipe ideas to inspire creative cooking is only part of what my work is about. That’s because, as our mothers and fathers always told us, we’re not done until we’ve cleaned up.

Indeed, it seems that the prospect of cleanup is often what stops us from cooking. We don’t like the mess, or the idea of storing things away in all their little cartons. Here’s what I have to say about that. It’s straight from page 58 in Hippie Kitchen (where if you do have a copy, you might find the sections just below on getting sauced and herbed rather fun).

So make it easy on yourself. After all, the cook counts too.

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.

I don’t have the recipe written up just yet, but I did dutifully put dried apricots in along with walnuts. Just the kind of muffin people would think is fun alongside the salad.

But, after behaving so well momentarily, I went back to my usual approach to cooking. I was on a muffins roll, but I certainly didn’t mess with the muffin tins again, pain in the neck that they are–both in fussing around with the knife to get each muffin out (and no I don’t want to use those paper cup thingies) and in washing the tins.

So it was back to cast iron as usual. My small pan since it was just me for breakfast. And yes, the center wasn’t quite done because of the size of the pan. And yes, I ate it anyway. And yes, it tasted as good as those chocolate lava cakes that came to be all the rage in precisely the same fashion: someone underbaked the cake and said, “This gooey part is the best!”

The vehicle shift was just the tip of the iceberg of course. The apricots and walnuts were gone. In their stead were two green apples, meat from half an acorn squash, and poppy seeds.

Which brings me to the real gist of this post: using your great big winter squashes. So many ways here besides freshly baked. Baked winter squashes whether acorns or spaghettis or butternut go into everything and anything: quick breads, warm salads with wintergreens and raisins, and pudding like custards or pies. Then again think sauces or gravies and get creative. Smash some of your winter squash into a roux of butter and flour, and whisk in milk. You’ll have a rather interesting brew for your broccoli.

I was reading in Rick Bayless’s work the other day and he noted how exceptionally creative Mexican cooks are. I snorted because in my mind he missed the point. It’s not Mexican cooks per se, it’s impoverished cooks. As in necessity breeds invention.

I know it’s been this way for me, divorced as I am from the land of crinkly packages in part because it’s too expensive. Without all those goodies around, I have to cook from scratch. Have to make use of things in the refrig like great big winter squashes. And in the process I discover over and again all kinds of delightful ways to spin food.

It’s like the difference between being a spectator at a sport and the actual players. The former sits and consumes and gets dull. The latter is up and active and engaged. She plays a vital roll in what comes down. She feels good. She’s empowered.

The gist of their idea is to soak dried apricots in warm wine and lemon juice, toss the plumped fruit with torn spinach leaves along with paper thin apple slices and walnut, and whisk oil into the wine brew for a dressing.

As I observe in my post on this salad, I had no lemons on hand the other day when I did the salad. Initially I thought I’d just skip the sour, but after a taste I realized the punch was missing. So I grabbed for the vinegar and splashed it about liberally right over the leaves. A brief toss and another taste. Delicious.

So what am I missing here? I am simply hopelessly pedestrian? Chuckle. Or did it work because I wasn’t actually drinking the wine, just using it in a dressing?

(Thanks to Chemistryland.com for this slide that showed up in the public domain.)

Flash cooking is the heart of my kitchen scene. It nets me plenty of fresh seasonal vegetables in short order–warm salad style. I’ve talked about it many times here on the blog, but people resonate with the idea so, that we did a video. It’s a 6 minute clip from chopping the onion to chowing down.

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.

One secret of this take on tabbouleh is making it the way they do in the Levant–where as my friend Rula Awaad-Rafferty observes, “it’s about the green, not the grain.”

The other secret is to go with what’s seasonal. No fresh tomatoes in spring, so a grand riot of greens held the day. Just ask Angela and Lenore who live next door. This salad is a hit for mommas and young’uns alike.

On Herbal Trips to the Spring Garden—

Even in the spring trips to the garden net different offerings from day to day. On this venture, who called out along with the parsley, mint, and thyme but some young onions, a couple small spinaches that wintered over, a few tarragon fronds, and a totally luscious hyacinth that went into a vase to keep the cook happy.

Cooking Beyond Measure, p. 72.
On Roasting Vegetables—

Vegetables roast marvelously well from low to high temperatures. On highs around 450 F, colors are preserved but you have to watch things like a hawk. Medium ovens of 350 work well too, and depending on what you’re roasting, munchies will be yours in a half hour. Then again if you’re going out for a walk you can turn the oven to 250. When you return, you’ll have the sweetest caramelized morsels a soul could ever ask for.

My preferred roasting vehicle is—or was—Jessie Branom’s extra large cast iron skillet. The iron and the sides of the pan cradle the vegetables in a cocoon of heat that caramelizes, and the veggies y turn out sweet and golden. Baking trays work too, but as you’ll discover if you use both vehicles like I usually do, the results cast iron produces are decidedly superior. Yet at this writing, a new over-sized cast iron skillet is on my shopping list. Here’s why.

Jessie Branom and my mother were close friends in Phoenix during the early 1960s where they raised their families. Jessie had two children; Mom had four. So the women reasoned that my mother should have the big frying pan Jessie owned, and Jessie should have my mother’s medium sized skillet. The swap was made, and much later after Mom passed away Jesse’s skillet came to me. I used it for years but as a historian who thinks in terms of centuries, I’m aware of how numbered our days are—and how things can get lost in the shuffle at the end of life.

So it was that Thanksgiving of 2007 when Jessie’s first granddaughter married, I posted the skillet swathed in wedding wrap. As I wrote to the young bride, Jenny Branom Patberg, “Great scratch cooks have used this skillet for a half century. May its journey go on.”

Postscript: I have by this time, 3 years after the above was written, purchased a new skillet which has definitely earned its keep and love as a new member of the kitchen family.