A few big spoons of small white Navy beans that were waiting in the fridge all cooked up, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and we were there. Grab the Parmigiano Reggiano–that we can afford since we grown our own and eat beans–some homemade Tangled Up Focaccia and we were there. On the deck with a glass of wine eating first class peasant food and loving it. Indeed, we don’t have to be gourmet to eat well, no?

Here’s how ultrafast cooking works in my hippie kitchen. In the morning when I’m having breakfast, I steam up a pot of quinoa. This grain cooks in 10 minutes and has the highest protein of them all. I leave it sitting out at room temperature and then when dinner comes along all’s that needs doing is chopping the last of the garden tomatoes, walking outside and plucking the end of the basil, and dressing with a polite pour of olive oil, swig of red wine vinegar, coarse salt, and fresh crack of peppper from the grinder.

All that and I get some leftover quinoa to put in a soup the next day or even mix with an egg and minced celery and onion to fry up into crisp patties. Yep. Having a pot of leftover whole grain around–whether it be millet, amaranth, wheat berries, brown rice, or quinoa–can make your kitchen life easy, frugal, healthy, and wise.

So rock & roll. It’s easy to make simple everyday food in your own kitchen. Fun too since you get to be the boss.

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.

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. There’s also a section devoted to it in Hippie Kitchen: 43-45. Think stir fry without the oil, Asian vegetables, or Asian flavors.

That’s why I’ve been smiling since watching Meryl Streep bring Julia Child alive once again on the big screen. Ah, yes. Wasn’t our Julia a grand dame.

And the Sole Meuniere scene. No way but that writer-director, Nora Ephron, would include Julia Child’s epiphany. That moment, when seated across from her debonair husband in Rouen, France, Julia Child tasted her first morsels of Sole Meuniere:  dover sole boned tableside and decked out in a buttery wine sauce.

It wasn’t more than two days after I saw the movie that I queued up at the fish counter. No dover in sight so I bought some cheap little Rex sole fillets. A quick dredge in flour (whole wheat of course, since the white stuff is sooo paste-y) and a quick pan fry. Then the sauce, which was the real reason for all this business. And I made so much of it that there was plenty leftover the next day to spoon on some zucchini.

Tak, Julia. Tak. Beurre Blanc made my eyes roll, too, right here at my own table.

You were right. We Americans do need to splash the wine about more in our kitchens–and get the butter out, too.

Olive oil’s good, definitely. But butter and wine? Mais oui!

At least that was the take home message I got from this latest film dedicated to your refined, magnanimous, brilliance.

Tak, Julia. Tak.

But, once you’ve messed about with Edouard’s Mother’s Tomatoes, I think you’ll find as I have, that it’s not easy to have enough of the fat, bold August bounty left for putting up.

The history on Edouard’s Mother’s Tomatoes is laid out in all its glory in Cooking Beyond Measure along with my observation that the dish is hands down the most luscious one in the book. I’m not alone in thinking tomatoes fixed this way is worth more than passing notice. The recent issue of Gourmet Magazine featured them under a different name, adding a sexy spin by drawing on anchovies instead of the usual white crystals for the salty element.

So there’s a sprinkling of salt in Edouard’s Mother’s Tomatoes. Also a grind of fresh pepper. Beyond that, here’s a hint. Miss Swishy, or Little Iris Johnson as she is known formally, thinks Edouard’s Mother’s Tomatoes are very meow-meow.

You’re right if you guessed cream. Warmed tomatoes laced cream. Totally decadent. But Edouard’s mother wouldn’t just plop some tomatoes into a skillet of cream now would she? Perish the thought. First she warmed the halves nicely in some lovely country butter she probably churned herself from contented pastured cows.

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.