Salad Days and Nights

Sometimes the day is long and despite my best intentions, I eat like crap. Here is something I did the other night that made me feel a lot better: I made myself a late night green salad.

The act of working with the fresh lettuce, tearing it with my hands, tossing it with the dressing gently, also with my hands, was an instant salve. When I ate the salad, I felt light and rejuvenated, not heavy and bloated like I would have felt if I'd ordered out pizza or something equally greasy. (Besides, if you are still hungry, that's what buttered toast is for.)

Those oval-shaped morsels hiding in the picture are fava beans. They taste bright and green, sweet but with a faint bitterness. They also happen to be real survivors. I planted them back in early December, but an unusually bitter cold spell in January killed them off, down to slimy black stubs. Fortunately I didn’t do anything, and slowly but surely as the weather warmed, the slimy black stubs sprouted new growth, and eventually gave me a decent harvest of beans. Feel free to apply this story metaphorically to your own life while you eat.

Fava beans are a great addition to a green salad, especially if you don’t have that many and need to stretch them out a bit. They only come briefly in springtime, so snatch them up while you still can. I like them best on my salad tossed with a scarcely there amount of olive oil and lemon juice, some shredded asiago cheese, and a little salt (just a little, but important). By the way, people always complain about what a pain it is to prepare fava beans. Don’t listen to them. It’s not a pain. Filling out forms that prove your kids are your kids, and are indeed kids, so the state of Georgia doesn’t kick them off of health insurance is a pain – this is not. What you need to do is shell the beans from their pods, then blanch them in boiling water for a minute. Immediately plunge them into ice water to stop the cooking, and then squeeze them out of their translucent skins. Then toss on your salad and eat.

(In other news, there is now a Southern Fried Curry page on Facebook. You can go check it out by clicking the dilapidated barn on your right. I'll be posting interesting articles I happen to come across, as well as my random thoughts pertaining to food that don't seem to fit into the blog here.)