purple carrots

When any of us think of carrots, the first thing that comes to mind is a bright orange vegetable. But if you do some research into the history of carrots (I know, I'm a dork), you'll find that orange carrots are a relative novelty compared to  the other colors of carrots.

Remember when I wrote about yellow carrots? Until the 1600s, carrots were usually one of two colors: yellow, like I posted about before, and PURPLE.

The lighting is bad here... but these carrots were actually really dark! I got them from my CSA, and had first thought they must be a trendy new breed of carrots. Little did I know it's actually a very old strain!

A little internet sleuthing (supported by the Carrot Wikipedia page) tells me that orange carrots were cultivated in the Netherlands in the 1600s in honor of the House of Orange. Before that, any recipe that called for carrots either had white-ish, yellow, or purple carrots!

They taste just the same as orange carrots, but feel much more historic (ha ha). Here we enjoyed them raw in a salad.

fava beans

Have you ever had fresh fava beans before? I have had them in restaurants, and have had canned fava beans (which are brown), but until last month I never had them fresh. My friend Michael at the Dazed and Infused blog and I split a CSA share from Waltham Fields Community Farm, a great organization in our city, and they had pick-your-own fava beans for a while. So I decided to try them! They turned out to be more labor intensive than I'd thought.

First, you pick them and bring them home and wash them:

Clean and shiny. THEN you remove the beans from the pod (which is inedible unless it's really young):

But wait! You're not done! The beans have a thick coating that is not pleasant to eat, so you have to PEEL EACH BEAN.

Unpeeled, half-peeled, peeled. It is really hard to peel them raw, so you blanch the beans, then slit the skin, then poke each bean out. And only THEN can you actually prepare the beans.

I cooked them with some garlic, olive oil, and a splash of cooking sherry, then mashed them to top some toast (pictured below with a salad).

They're tasty beans, but I didn't think they were worth all that work! From now on I will probably only buy prepared fava beans, either at restaurants or in a can.