Celebrating an all-natural lifestyle

In Praise of Fava Beans

Happy Monday! Glad you’re enjoying the Hippocrates Health Institute video giveaway. It’s been brought to my attention that the video set being offered is worth about $200. So this is quite a steal! If you haven’t entered yet, check it out.

It’s safe to say that all legumes are cherished in the CR kitchen. There’s one bean, however, that holds a special place in my heart. Fava beans–or broad beans, as they English like to call them–top the list of my favorites. Fava beans, which appear in literature dating back to Greco-Roman times, were the only beans eaten by Europeans before they discovered a cornucopia of legumes in the Americas. If we judged beans by size alone, then the unusually plump favas would be kings of the bean world. But it’s not the size alone that makes them so beloved among foodies. They’re also nutty and sweet, and they lend wonderful flavor and texture to late spring and early summer dining. They’re a pain to prepare, but in some ways, the labor intensive process (which can be truncated by cooks in a time crunch) only seems to win them more devotion.

Cooking with fava beans starts with these thick, spotted pods.

Yes, they’re a little creepy looking. Get over it.

To prepare fava beans, you split the pods open and remove the fat beans inside. This actually isn’t easy: the pods don’t just open with a little tug, and you may need a paring knife to help the process along. When you finish, you ought to have a nice little pile of beans for cooking.

To make them edible, you’ll need to par boil them for at least 4-5 minutes in boiling, salted water. I usually give them about 5 minutes, or until they’re tender.

At this point, the beans will be edible, but still hiding under a pale green, waxy coating. If you’re going to serve the beans to guests, I recommend that you remove the coating after giving the beans a little dip in cold water. However, if you’re going to be pureeing them (which, as you’ll see in a moment, I often am), or eating them solo (which again, I often am), it won’t hurt you to leave the waxy coating intact. It’s un-photogenic, but not harmful.

If you are cooking for a crowd, remove the coating. At this point, your beans are ready to be sauteed with olive oil and garlic, to be put in vegetable ragouts, to be served in grain dishes, or whatever presentation you’ve got your heart set on. Lover of bean puree that I am, one of my favorite ways to serve fava beans is in a thick fava puree.

Fava Bean Puree (serves 2-3)

2 cups cooked fava beans, waxy skins removed if possible
3-4 tablespoons high quality olive oil
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 clove garlic, chopped or minced
1/2 tsp salt
Pepper to taste

Place beans, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and pepper in the bowl of your food processor (fitted with the S blade), and run the motor till the mixture is chunky and broken down. With the motor running, add olive oil in a thin stream until the mix is blending well. Stop, scrape the bowl, and process again, repeating the process until the puree is totally smooth and uniform (it’s exactly like making hummus).

You’ll have the best results with the puree if you work with fava beans that are still warm from cooking.

You’ll notice that this is one of the few recipes I ever add garlic to. I don’t always, but I do find that it enhances the flavor in a positive way. (It also reminds me of the way my Greek mama and Yaya like ‘em!)

The finished puree should be bright green and fragrant. Garnish with a little lemon zest or fresh herbs, and serve as a dip or spread.

The other way I like to eat fava beans is in a simple vegetable ragout. Look up “ragout” online, and you’ll see that it’s often defined as stew: I personally associate ragouts not with hearty winter dishes, but with light assemblies of spring and summer vegetables. My own ragout recipe–the one I’m about to share–is prepared raw-style, but could just as easily work by steaming the veggies, rather than dehydrating them.

Summer Vegetable Ragout with Fava Beans (serves 1)

2 cups summer vegetables of choice: I used broccoli, summer squash, wax beans, and spinach
1/2 cup fava beans, cooked
1/4 cup fresh parsley, flat or curly
1 tablespoon good olive oil
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp lemon zest
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients till evenly coated, and place on a dehydrator sheet. Dehydrate at 115 degrees for about an hour, till the vegetables are tender and much reduced.

What you’ll have is a simple yet delicious sampling of farmer’s market bounty, prepared without fuss. I like to serve my ragout over a bed of grains. In this case, it was millet:

It was a perfect, satisfying, and simple dinner.

You may have noticed that I didn’t bother to remove the waxy skins from the beans. If I had, they’d have looked smoother and more bright. But sometimes we food bloggers can’t concern ourselves too much with the camera, and I had a growling belly.

If you’ve never tackled the mighty fava bean, it’s time to muster up some courage. They bring a lot of personality to a meal, and they also feel substantial (or “meaty,” to use a word I like less), so they’re a great food to serve when you’re cooking vegetarian for non-vegetarian diners. Like most beans, they’re rich in protein, iron, potassium, and fiber, so they make a nourishing meal for everyone. Give either of these dishes a shot, or come up with one of your own. And if you do, come tell me about it!

Tomorrow, I’ll give you a recipe for a “superfood” smoothie (served up with a wink). In the meantime, have a great night!

xo

Broccoli Hummus Recipe

How do I love thee, hummus? Let me count the ways:

I love my zucchini hummus. I love my digestive-friendly hummus. I love hummus in wraps, on salads, and served up with veggies for dipping. I love it almost as much as I love my guac, and sometimes more. No matter how you slice or dice it, I’m a hummus fiend.

My friend Caroline is a hummus fiend, too. And as it turns out, she’s also a lover of broccoli (in fact, that most beloved of crucifers is nestled snugly in her blog title). Recently, as I was reading Caroline’s blog, I thought, “Hmm. Broccoli+hummus. Broccoli hummus?” Heck, if I could make it out of raw zucchini, then surely I could make it out of broccoli, too?

The problem was that I worried about the bitterness of raw broccoli. Dearly though I love that veggie in any shape or form, it tends to pack a spicy (and not always pleasing) bite when we’re lovin’ it in the raw. Still, recent experiments with a broccoli-tahini pate had given me encouragement that raw broccoli can, with the right balance of flavors, be perfectly mellow. And so, with Miss Caroline in mind, I set out to concoct a recipe for a raw hummus that’s simple, tasty, and that tempers the bitterness of raw broc.

The key, it turned out, was to mix broccoli and zucchini together in equal parts. The rest was predictable: tahini, a little nooch (that’s nutritional yeast for you non-vegans), some salt, pepper, and even a squirt of mustard, and my perfect broccoli hummus–all raw and vegan–came to be. I spent the better part of my weekend doing away with the stuff, but graciously saved a photo for you all from today’s lunch, at work:

Caroline, this baby’s for you.

Gena’s (Raw) Broccoli Hummus (yields about 1 1/2 – 2 cups)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups raw broccoli, chopped
1 1/2 cups raw zucchini, chopped
1/3 cup raw sesame tahini (substitute regular tahini if that’s what you have)
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tbsp organic mustard (totally optional)
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp cumin
3 tbsp lemon juice
Freshly ground pepper

Place the veggies into your processor and process till finely chopped. Add remaining ingredients, and blend till smooth. This will mean stopping a few times to scrape your bowl!

If the mix is too thick — which it may well be — add a thin stream of water or more lemon juice to thin it out. I like my hummus very thick, and the zucchini adds liquid, so I only added a few tablespoons of water as I went along.

What’s a better way to pack nutrition into your lunch than to infuse your hummus with green power? This is a great way to get kids to eat their broccoli (or, if you’re a broccoli fanatic like Caroline, to find ways to eat more of the stuff). And it’s also just a darn tasty recipe, which I think you’ll all love. It’s great on its own, but I’ve already enjoyed it in raw wraps and scooped atop salads, as pictured in this post.

So next time you whip up a batch of chickpea crack hummus, keep this variety in mind. Your body will thank you for the boost of calcium and protien, and your palate will thank you, period.

Before I go, a note to people who use Google Reader: last night, a few of you let me know that my posts were just showing up as blurbs. This was not intentional–I was fiddling with some techie stuff for the blog and changed it by accident–so no need to, um, freak out at me, as a few of you did! My settings are back to normal, and my posts should show up in full next time.

xo

A Rockin Raw Wrap

Hey guys!

Glad you’re into the Sun In Bloom menu! I’m not quite done with my tribute to this fabulous new eatery. I have one more SIB inspired recipe to share with you, and it’s a winner.

So a few of you may have noticed a special wrap on the SIB menu: the rockin’ veggie, described as “live hummus and toasted vegetables (dehydrated bell peppers, zucchini, carrots) with a mix of sprouts, cucumber, cabbage dressed in sib’s fresh live tahini dressing & invigorating lemon vinaigrette.” Um, holy yum! This whole dish sounds like heaven to me, but one thing in particular stuck out: the dehydrated veggies. Why, I thought when I read this, has it never occurred to me to chop and dehydrate veggies to chop into nut pates, cauliflower rice, or hummus? What a simple, yet revelatory idea!

So, with a nod to Aimee Follette, I decided to make my own version of a “rockin’ veggie” wrap. No, it’s not quite as complex as the SIB original, but it was mighty good, and it was actually easy to assemble at work!

Gena’s Rockin’ Veggie Wrap (serves 1)

It began by my marinating 1 cup of mixed veggies in a quick marinade of equal parts olive oil, lemon juice, and nama shoyu for about two hours. I removed the veggies from the marinade, spread them on a teflex-lined dehydrator sheet, and dehydrated them for about four hours. They emerged slightly shrunken, soft, and delicious.

If you’re trying this at home, you could easily put the veggies in an oven set low (say, 275 or so) for about an hour.

I stored the veggies in the fridge overnight, and brought them to work with me the following day, along with a 1/2 cup serving of my digestive friendly hummus (NB: you could also use zucchini hummus, regular hummus, or a bean dip of your choosing), and four large Lacinato kale leaves. At work, I mixed the veggies and hummus together, like so:

…and stuffed the filling into the two kale leaves (to do this, I spread it at the bottom end of the kale leaf, leaving about an inch of space, and rolled up from bottom to top).

Cute, no?

I served these alongside a salad + simple tahini dressing, and concluded that it was one of the best lunches I’d had in ages (I was rolling wraps as I went along, so only two are pictured here):

See?

Now that’s what I call a crack wrap.

This lunch reminded me that sometimes the best and most inspiring ideas are the most simple. I have a feeling that dehydrated veggies will be making more frequent appearances in my kitchen, in myriad ways!

That’s my news on this foggy Monday night, friends. Hope your weeks are off to good starts. Quick head’s up that my friend Zesty is hosting a bread giveaway at his blog — Asiago cheese not required!

I’ll be back soon with yet another giveaway of my own. Night, folks!

xo

Digestive-Friendly Hummus

Happy Monday, folks.

Glad you’re into the coco-gurt!

A few days ago, reader Mandy wrote in to ask how I cook my beans. Good question, Mandy: I’ve mentioned before that I prefer to eat beans cooked to raw, but I’ve never said how I cook them.

I should preface this post by saying that strict raw foodists would string me up for saying that cooked beans are preferable to sprouted ones. But I’ve eaten quite a lot of beans in my day, and time and again I find the cooked ones infinitely more digestible than raw varieties. And as for flavor, well, let’s just say that anyone who’s eaten sprouted chickpeas can probably attest to the fact that they’re an acquired taste.

I have not acquired it.

We all know the old adage. Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart, and so it goes. Beans tend to cause gas for one of two reasons. First, they’re inherently miscombined (protein+starch), which means that they can be tricky for people who are sensitive to food combining. Second? Beans contain a particular sugar, oligosaccharide, that the human body can’t efficiently break down (we lack the necessary enzyme) in the early stages of digestion. As the sugars are ultimately broken down in the small intestine, a fair amount of gas is released in the process.

Beans may be “nature’s little food combining exception,” but many people who typically follow food combining find that they aren’t too problematic. I, for one, can combine beans as a starch and feel just fine. If you have trouble digesting beans, I’d venture to say that the likely cause is the indigestible oligosaccharide. There are a few solutions to this dilemma. One, believe it or not, is Beano, which is essentially a synthetic enzyme that can break down the indigestible sugar. However, after I wrote down that suggestion last night, a friend alerted me that Beano is not vegan — it contains fish gelatin. I had no idea, and I’m grossed out, because the last time I took Beano was after I went vegan. However, never to fear: I learned that Udo Erasmus makes a similar digestive enzyme to Beano, and that there is another vegan, gluten-free alternative called Bean-Zyme. Check those out!

Another trick is to soak the beans for a good long time before you boil them; I always do this, and I always find that it makes a difference. Finally, you can add kombu, a kind of seaweed, to beans as you boil them; supposedly, the kombu’s amino acids help to make beans more digestible.

What do I do? I typically soak dry beans overnight, discard soak water, and cook them in fresh water for 1-4 hours (depending on the bean). I rarely bother with kombu, but more power to you if you do!

If I don’t have time to do all that, I do this:

Yes. Canned. Sue me. Eden actually uses kombu in the cooking process, which means they earn some props in my book!

Another question I’m often asked is, what about hummus? Is it raw? How does it combine?

Well, since most hummus is made with cooked beans, it’s certainly not raw (some raw foodists make it with sprouted chickpeas: once again, I absolutely cannot tolerate ‘em!). And since it combines beans (a protein/starch) with a nut product (tahini), most hummus is miscombined, too. Now, if you’re like me, and you liken hummus to manna from the heavens, you don’t think twice about whether it’s miscombined before digging in. I eat hummus all the time and don’t sweat it; of course, a healthy diet and food combining most of the time keep my digestion strong enough to enjoy tricky foods now and again.

But today, I want to offer a special hummus option to those of you who are super-duper sensitive to miscombining. One is zucchini hummus, which I’ve blogged about here.  This uses zucchini as a base and sesame seeds or tahini as flavoring. If you want the taste, texture, and hearty protein of a bean-based hummus, though, that’s also well combined, I do have a simple variety for you. It’s my tummy-friendly hummus, and it uses only olive oil and spices.

The good news about this hummus is that it’s a bit lighter than many hummus varieties, since it doesn’t use tahini. But how, you’re asking, can the recipe preserve the creaminess we associate with traditional hummus, if we don’t use any tahini, and we only use a moderate amount of olive oil?

Simple: the main trick is to use warm chickpeas to make your hummus. It’s incredible how warm beans contribute to a creamy end result. I also use the cooking liquid of the hummus, which has retained some starch, to keep the mixture smooth and rich (or, if you’re using canned beans, some of the canning liquid). These two tricks ensure hummus that, if not entirely traditional, is as tasty as the usual variety.

So how does this all work? Here we go:

Gena’s Tummy-Friendly Hummus (yields 1 1/3 cups)

2 cups (or 1 can) garbanzo beans, fresh from boiling (if you use canned, steam them till warmed through)
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced (optional)

Blend all ingredients in a food processor till relatively smooth. Then, add 1-3 tbsp of either the water you boiled the beans in, OR the leftover juice from the can, in a thin stream. Don’t add too much — just enough to get the whole mix creamy and smooth! Check seasonings, and adjust if needed. Serve sprinkled with paprika and a touch of parsley.

And serve it up with some Beano if you like

Here’s the magic hummus, served up with veggie crudites. Perfect for afternoon noshin’!

Isa Chandra Moskowitz says that hummus is to vegetarians and vegans what air is to the rest of humanity. She’s pretty much right.

Hope that those of you with tender bellies will give this wonderful, light, and simple recipe a try. Enjoy!

Before I go, I’m happy to say that the sassy, smart, and totally incredible Rachel–maker of world class playlists–awarded me a Sunshine Award.

Thank you, Rachel — I’m honored! The award “is awarded to bloggers whose positivity and creativity inspire others in the blog world.” And it’s my job to pass it on to twelve new people.

Well, nearly all of my fellow bloggers inspire me on an almost daily basis. But since I have to pick, here are the folks I’d like to share the award with–many of whom wrote brave posts for NEDA week:

Melissa of Trying to Heal

Nicole of Another One Bites the Crust

Kristin of Kristin’s Nibbles

Andrea of Off Her Cork

Rachel of Workout Out Wellness

Jenny of Peanut Butter and Jenny

Lori and Michelle of Pure2Raw

Sophia of Burp and Slurp

Danielle of Coffee Run

Katherine of Runner Wife’s Life

Kate of Getting Raw

Ian of Penk’s Place

You guys inspire me more than I can say!

xo

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