Friday, February 22, 2013

Baby favas with chicken and bacon

The other day I went to an organic food store with a friend. I bought what I thought was a container of green beans, but which turned out to be baby favas. I only know one way to deal with fava beans - boil them in salt water (shucked beforehand - in Poland you can buy them already shucked) and eat em. Delicious. But I was willing to try something new. I was, however, resistant to the idea of eating the pods, even if they are allegedly ok when still young. Just didn't appeal to me. The fact that recipes I found suggested grilling them didn't assuage my fears. So I shucked them, which left me with only a few handfuls of wee little beans. This quickly tanked my lofty plans to make several dishes out of them, Iron Chef style.

In the end, having browsed various recipes online, I defrosted 3 slices of the bacon from my cache, chopped them and fried until nearly crispy. Pressed in a few cloves of garlic, stirred, then added some diced chicken rolled in oregano (or maybe thyme. Jury is still out). Once that was nearly cooked, I added the fava beans, stirred, then splashed maybe 1/2 a cup of white wine in and simmered until it was evaporated and everything was cooked through. I served it over polenta with some grated Parmesan, and overall it was pretty decent. In the future though - I'd do it without the favas. They added very little joy. I'll have to find something else to do with those, I guess.





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